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Article posted on Jan 30

The future is now!

Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 30, 2006, 2:31 am

So, I just found out about this new peripheral called a "mouse". Appearantly you no longer have to be confined to using a light pen; instead, you move a rodent-shaped device over your desk, and a triangle-shaped cursor mimics your moves on the compuscreen. Quite a radical idea...

Anyways, somebody used finnix-hwsubmit to submit a report that said everything worked fine, but there was no mouse support. Now, normally I don't use the mouse that often (on the desktop I use fluxbox, which is rather keyboard-friendly), so I didn't even consider gpm support for Finnix. Plus, with kernel 2.4, it used to be annoying setting up mouse support (PS2 port vs USB, PS2 vs ImPS2 protocol, etc), but kernel 2.6 makes it a lot easier. Now, everything is routed through /dev/input/mice, which simulates an ImPS2 device.

I haven't begun coding yet, but I have an idea of what should be done to get gpm working in Finnix. Load the base mousedev module, start gpm, load psmouse module, then usbmouse if USB was detected earlier. And of course, there will also be a "nomouse" boot option.

I'm not sure when the next version of Finnix will be released. I think I'm going to say mid- to late-March, or when 2.6.16 is released, whichever comes first.

2 Comments
Posted in Development, Finnix

2 Responses to “The future is now!”

Nazo says:

February 4, 2006 at 12:06 pm

I'm not sure how much this is really needed though. There is one occasion in which console mouse support has been useful beyond belief for me though. Links in graphical mode has been, on a couple of occasions, a complete life-saver (every now and then you have to see images to do your work -- even if this is poor coding on the part of the page designer.) Don't guess Links in graphical mode is possible though. I think it needs QT to function (well, the System Rescue CD people managed to get stuff like this to fit on a small image that fits on a mini-cd, but, I don't know if they had to throw QT in there or not.)

Beyond that, I'm not sure how much difference it will really make. Still, GPM is small and it has it's moments, so it does make sense to get it in there for later if nothing else.

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Raken says:

February 7, 2006 at 10:43 am

There is a very useful application of this electronic rodent: cut&paste of verbatim text (eg filenames) from error-messages or logfiles into commandline. Cut&paste has the wonderful property of enhanced correctness :).

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