i'm not sure if this is a mouse question or a kernel question, but i'd like to ask anyway. i personally never really owned a machine with windows. but of course, i have many friends that do. one of my friends who's kind of linux savy asked me a question that i couldn't answer. take a random computer and consider the mouse. could be ps/2, serial or usb. could be any number of protocols - imps2, intellimouse, logitech new and old... whatever. install windows on the system. the mouse will work. perhaps you won't get all the functionality of the mouse without the mouse specific drivers, but the mouse will be functional. install debian (what i use). you need to tell gpm what type of mouse (by indicating which device file to use). you also need to tell gpm which protocol using the -t option. why is this? i guess the real question isn't "why can't the mouse 'just work' under linux". it's more like "how can windows detect all this information accurately". i don't think this is a matter of all the drivers being contained on the windows install disk. i know that every hardware manufacturer from A to Z has their driver included on the MS disk, and when the windows kernel detects hardware via something equivalent to lspci, it loads the proper driver. but this is a mouse. i don't think mice send identifying magic the way a PCI device does when you probe it. so what's microsoft's magic here? pete -- Enron..safe legal abortion..civil liberty..repealing ICBM treaty..deficit.. What's worse? Screwing an intern or screwing an entire country? PGP Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
