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Please help with Slackware 8.1 USB mouse

I

Inktomei

Junior Member
Hi all,

I'm in need of some advice on how to install USB support on Slackware 8.1. Here's my system configuration:

1) Adaptec 19160 SCSI card
2) IBM DDYS 18Gig 68pin SCSI drive
3) Epox EP-8K7A with AMD XP 1700+
4) Generic keyboard
*** Logitech USB Optical mouse


And what I have done so far:

1) Installed Slackware 8.1 by booting from the installation CD.
2) I had to pass the argument "adaptec.s" at the initial setup boot screen so FDISK/CFDISK could recognize my SCSI card.
3) Got to the point where I got to choose what Kernel image to install, I chose "adaptec.s" because I needed that to boot to my SCSI hard drive.
4) Finished the installation; rebooted with no problem
5) When I tried to "startx", I got this error (just the 3 lines from the error screen)

(EE) Mouse1: cannot open input device
(EE) PreInit failed for input device "Mouse1"
No core pointer

Fatal server error:
failed to initialize core devices

6) So then I reinstalled Slackware (this time I used an IDE drive instead, and unplugged my SCSI drive) and I chose the "usb.s" as my kernel image.
7) That booted just fine, and I was able to "startx" and used my USB Optical mouse in KDE.

My question is, how can I load USB(Optical) support for my mouse and be able to use my SCSI drive at the same time? Please point me in the right direction to get this setup working properly. Thanks for any input in advance!
 
Ok sounds like in the adaptec image it doesn't have USB support compiled into the kernel. It may be in a kernel module, but I don't know what the module's names would be, you'll have to find out if you want to use them....

buy the way you don;t have to reinstall linux to change the kernel. You can use all the different kernels you want, all you have to is reboot everytime you needed a change. You could of just gone into the cd and copyed usb.s to the root directory and had lilo make another entry in the boot loader.

The first thing I like to do with a new installation is make a custom kernel. I go online and download the latest stable kernel source (currently 2.4.19) and compile a kernel with all the stuff I need and none of the stuff I don't. You tend to get a bit of a performance boost with it and It utimatly make things a little bit more stable.

You can get a detailed howto here.
You will have to add support HID (human interface device) and USB.

One thing about Slackware that got me is that the stock kernel is located in the /boot directory. But the default linux location is the root directory, so you may have to edit /etc/lilo.conf and run lilo again. But that's ok because then you can have 2 entries at boot loader. On pointing to /boot/(stock kernel) and /vmlinuz

Another thing one you go and untar the source in the /usr/src directory. The defualt folder for the tarball to go to is linux directory. ---Slackware may put a symlink (like shortcuts in windows) there. You will have to deal with this before untarring everything.

It's worth it to know how to do this stuff. It may seem confusing or difficult at first, but after a couple times it becomes very easy. Be sure to make a boot disk before hand to save you if didn't do it correctly or lilo screwed up!
 
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