Subject: wrong /dev/console messes up mouse -- why?

From: Joey Hess <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 12:18:30 -0400 (EDT)

I touched on this in an earlier message about making a debian box run
headless (turns out the problem I encoutnered was my mistake). Anyway,
it's piqued my curiosity about something:

In debian, /dev/console is generally a symlink to /dev/tty0. I managed to
mess that up so /dev/console linked to /dev/tty1. Most stuff continued to
work fine, the only casulty was my mouse. I have a serial mouse, and I run
gpm and also start up X. This works fine, the 2 don't normally conflict.
If /dev/console is linked to /dev/tty1, though, they do conflict, and X
only gets some of the mouse events it should get, leading to a choppy
mouse movement at best. 

Anyone know why /dev/console is important to gpm or to x in this way? I
don't think it's a bug, I just wanna figure out _why_ this happens..

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -lisubstr($_,39+38*sin++$y/9,2)=$s # [email-masked]
for($s='  '||McQ;$_='JOEY HESS 'x8;print){eval$^I} #         Joey Hess
                      "He. He. He." - - Herman Toothrot

---

From: [email-masked] (Bernd Eckenfels)
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 00:52:46 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi,

> don't think it's a bug, I just wanna figure out _why_ this happens..

I reported it to the Maintainer and Upstream deveoper already. GPM should
use /dev/tty0 instead of /dev/console, since /dev/console might be pointing
to other hardware some times. Should be fixed in recent Packages?

Greetings
Bernd

---

From: Dominik Kubla <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 18:14:00 +0200

Hello Joey,

> don't think it's a bug, I just wanna figure out _why_ this happens..

This is a bug in GPM which i (informally) brought up in connection
with support of serial console devices on debian-devel some time ago.

GPM needs to access the Virtual Console Master (= /dev/tty0). But since
/dev/tty0 was a symlink to /dev/console in the early years of Linux, the
author assumed that /dev/console is the VC master. Now it's the other
way round /dev/console -> /dev/tty0. That is the reason that this bug
goes unnoticed for most of the Debian users.  If you happen to use a
Serial Console device than GPM won't even start ...  The same is true
for SVGAlib applications and some of the X-Servers.

So the bug is easy to fix: Just substitute /dev/console with /dev/tty0
in the sources.  (I have cc-ed this to the package maintainer, because
i think he will fix it without a formal bug report :)

Cheers,
  Dominik

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Visit the FAN SITE of the WORLD LEAGUE OF AMERICAN FOOTBALL:
<A HREF="http://www.uni-mainz.de/~kubla/WLAF/Welcome.html>HTTP</A> or
<A HREF="file:/afs/zdv.uni-mainz.de/homes/UFO/kubla/public_html/WLAF/Welcome.ht
ml">AFS file</A> access.