Finding stuff in slackware

Wew! My last post was so angsty I feeled embarased just looking at it.

OK so I'll try to help some peoplenow to get on a better mood now. Let's talk about Slackware.

If Slackware is famous for something is for being hard on newbies. That said, it is possible to get things working if you keep on trying. Unfortunately, finding help for slackware isn't exactly easy. I had a lot of trouble geting X to work, then getting X to work with my mouse.

Google is your frind they say, so um... ok I googled for these words forever: "xorgconfig mouse problems", "slackware do not detect mouse", "where is the mouse by default".

I got nowhere but I was able to fix my problems by doing these tricks. Firstly. Get a LiveCD that works on your PC. I love Ubuntu, it's free and they ship it to you if you care to wait for it. But really, any Live CD will do.

The configuration for your X server is located in /etc/X11/xorgconfig Just copy this file to a floppy and you there you go! a (kinda) working X server. By the way, to copy to floppy just type mount -vt auto /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy. Feel free to ad a sudo in there if you are not root, the floppy now is accesible in /mnt/floppy, but only if that location exists! so create it first.

But this didn't fix my mouse problem. That's because the mouse is located in different device ports for different systems. So how to find your mouse? well open that xorgconfig file and find the mouse section, in the device option, point it to /dev/mouse. Now if your mouse is not detected on /dev/mouse, let's make it do so!.

You just have to type ln -si /dev/mouse /dev/wherever_your_mouse_is. That creates a link from /dev/mouse to your mouse. It works but, now, wheres is the danged mouse? well, it definitively is located somewhere in /dev. the common ports are the /dev/ttySx series, or /dev/input/mice. Mine was on /dev/ps2. But how to find out wich one? if anything fails, you can manually probe each of the common ports. This is one of the secret tricks of linux. You can actually see the code generated by your mouse! to do this we use the standard tool cat. Just do cat /dev/ps2 and move your mouse, if that's where your mouse is you will see code appear as you move it, a la Matrix if not, just Ctrl+c to get out of it and try another one.

Hope that helps someone. Next time, getting the most of your console with screen