Linux Mandrake help for a newbie

[uCsDNerd]

Sup guys. I just installed Linux Mandrake 8.2 just for kicks on my system. I'm dual booting it with Windows 2k Pro (which i'm using right now). Anyhow, I've got a couple of setup questions for you.

1 - I can't seem to get my USB mouse working on Linux. During install it detected my mouse just fine, but now it doesn't seem to see it.

2 - I've had Win2k on my HD for a while now and just installed Linux as a dual boot OS. So now whenever I boot up my computer it gives me a linux based OS selector. I can choose a few different options for Linux and toward the bottom of the list is Windows NT. It starts off preselecting linux. How can I make this (if possible) start off preselecting NT?

Thanks for the help. I have no idea what to do with Linux, I just thought it'd be fun to mess around with. Now I've gotta find out how to do that-

 

[TheOmegaCode]

w00t, a question i can answer!!! ok, for the boot screen, you need to edit lilo.conf. Just set NT to default. After you do this, you need to run lilo. Both are in different locations so search for them. As for the mouse...

 

[sean2002]

I have no real help but when I tried mandrake I too had USB mouse problems (explorer 3.0) it would work for a few seconds then freeze, I solved it by getting a USB to PS2 adapter

 

[uCsDNerd]

thanks for the tip Omega, but one question ... how do i do a search?
Not having a working mouse WAY slows down my poke and see tactics.

Looks like a USB to PS/2 converter is probably the only solution huh? I guess mandrake has no good USB support(?) thanks sean.

 

[AkumaBao]

Whoa. Linux has excellent USB support. You can try various things to do this. If gpm is running this could be causing it to stop. Go into a terminal window, and type"gpm stop". ( It should be in /etc/init.d ) Go back to the Desktop manager, and see if that works. That's usually a good reason a USB mouse is not working. If that doesn't work, try a different mouse setting.

 

[TheWart]

Run "cat /dev/input/mice" or "cat /dev/mouse" and you should see some wird looking characters on the screen when you move or click the mouse.

 

[n0cmonkey]

How did you setup your mouse in /etc/X11/XF86Config?

/etc/lilo.conf to edit the file, /sbin/lilo to run it (must run as root).

Learn the "man" command. Its very important and will keep you from having to ask some stupid questions. "find" would be the command to look for files on the hard drive. After reading the man page, if you still have some questions about it ask away.

 

[uCsDNerd]

haha. funny u should mention the man pages, I just used them earlier this morning to fix the boot up problem. As for the mouse, I tried the gpm stop solution and nothing happened. I tried running the dev/mouse stuff, and nothing happened. And I'll lookup the X86Config when I get home later tonight. Thanks for the help again . This is really helping me learn the OS a bit more.

 

[manly]

Run the command /sbin/lsmod to see what modules are loaded into your running kernel. For USB mouse (and keyboard) support, the following lines should be found in the output:

mousedev 3872 2
keybdev 1664 0 (unused)
hid 17760 0 (unused)
input 3072 0 [mousedev keybdev hid]
usb-uhci 20996 0 (unused)
usbcore 47616 1 [hid usb-uhci]

If they aren't there, then you'll have to configure Mandrake to load up the necessary USB modules upon boot-up. I would have suspected v. 8.2 would do it that by default.

On SuSE, these modules are actually loaded through an initrd.

edit:

Here's a SuSE document that has generic help applicable to Linux/X11.