> On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Mike Taylor wrote: > Lots of people seem to have problems getting PS2 mice up. My Gateway + > PS2 worked fine under Slackware 3.0, but I still can't get it to work > under Debian. I have tried all the stuff that you tried plus > compiling a custom kernel (with the Debian source package) but no dice. > My (admittedly cowardly) solution: cheap serial mouse.
My experience is that there are a couple of good hardware reasons for getting serial mice instead of PS/2 mice: -- we accidentally fried a BIOS chip by delivering a static charge through a PS/2 mouse. This has never happened with a serial mouse, and leads me to suspect that the PS/2 connector (or at least the connector we used to have on our R.I.P. Asus '486 motherboard) is less robust against static than an serial connector. -- removing the PS/2 mouse frees up an IRQ. -- one never knows if/when PS/2 mouse is going to be available in a downloaded kernel, whereas serial support is virtually always there. I have had some problems with some serial mice though, particularly those cheap ones which change their state when the power goes off. Cheers, Susan Kleinmann
