Subject: Re: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work

From: Mark Edward Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 18:04:12 +0100 (BST)

Thanks to all who replied to this posting. I have now got the 
mouse working. 

To summarise :

Support for PS/2 mouse is not in the kernel on the standard Debian boot 
disk, either built in or as a module. Thus, to use a PS/2 mouse one has 
to obtain a kernel with the required support. The special kernel 1 has 
the neccessary psaux.o module, so obtaining the corresponding image 
package, installing it, and adding "psaux" to the appropriate config 
file (/etc/modules ? I can't remember) will do the job.

Ideally, however, I would have liked to compile a kernel which supported 
the PS/2 mouse, as well as some other features of the GATEWAY 2000, such 
as APM, and use that. I downloaded and installed the kernel source 
package from 1.1.3, configured it, and tried to make the image by doing
	./debian.rules

This did not work, however - the make failed (after the best part of an 
hour had elapsed) when it was unable to find "as86". I could not find 
as86 anywhere on my system, and so was stuck.

Am I doing something wrong, or is it the case that the kernel-source 
package is flawed ?

BTW, when I tried to config under X with make xconfig, tk failed with a 
complaint about there being no such colour as "gray" !?!? Any ideas here ?

Some suggestions :

	- The default boot disk should have PS/2 mouse support 
	  available as a module, since the PS/2 mouse seems a 
	  reasonably common device, and new users will not be happy 
	  if they have to go to great lengths just to get their mouse
	  working.

	- The modules.tgz file on the special kernel 1 boot disk
	  is corrupted. If this was fixed I could have obtained the
	  module I needed by extracting it from this file.

	- The apparent dependency of the kernel compilation procedure
	  on as86 should be resolved - if this file is neccessary then
	  it should be in one of the packages upon which the 
	  kernel-source package depends.

Thanks again for everyone's help, 

Mark Johnston.

---

From: [email-masked] (Gilbert Ramirez Jr.)
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 16:39:47 -0500 (CDT)

> 	  module I needed by extracting it from this file.

I'd like to take time to point this out. I thought that I was the only one
experiencing this problem, but Mark is the third person who has remarked
about this.

This is true of Debian-1.1.2. I haven't checked 1.1.3.

All the special-kernel boot-disks have a corrupt modules.tgz file on them.
It's a valid gzip file, but an invalid tar file. It's as if the tar file
was cut in half or something.

The way to get around this is to download the kernel-image package to
another Unix machine, use ar and gzip and tar to extract the modules you
need, then build your own modules.tar.gz file. Then copy it onto the boot
disk (it has an MS-DOS filesystem onit) as 'modules.tgz'.

This will then let you install the kernel.

--gilbert
______________________________________________________________________
Gilbert Ramirez Jr.                     [email-masked]
University of Texas                     http://merece.uthscsa.edu/gram
Health Science Center at San Antonio    University Health System

---

From: Mark Eichin <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 Aug 1996 19:52:36 -0400

> as86 anywhere on my system, and so was stuck.

Hmm. Perhaps kernel-package should depend on bin86?  You definitely
need the bin86 package to build a kernel (it has as86 and ld86.)

Package: bin86
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: devel
Maintainer: Joost Witteveen <[email-masked]>
Version: 0.3-1
Depends: libc5
Description: Assembler and loader for kernel compilation.

---

From: Derek Lee <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 11:13:45 -0400

The standard kernel image from debian does not support ps2 mouse.
Look in the special-kernels directory. There is a config file for each
kernel to tell you what the kernel supports. I believe the kernel that was
built with config-1 contains ps2 mouse support.  It should contain a
line like 

CONFIG_PSMOUSE=m

which means that psmouse is supported as a module.

Unfortunately, I have not used these kernels so maybe you can confirm
this with somebody else...

--Derek Lee