wierd mouse problem on new installation

K

k2msmith

I just recently installed a new freebsd 7.1 system. The X server seems to be detecting my USB mouse and keyboard automatically and my graphics card is displaying the correct resolution.

The problem is that when my mouse pointer moves across window borders ( I am using fluxbox - at least initially), it is automatically turning into a resize cursor and causing the window to resize as I drag - without a button press. This problem seems to be intermittent - but once it starts, I can't stop it - even if I restart the X server with ctrl-alt-shift-delete.I thought the problem might be related to a belkin monitor/keyboard/mouse switcher, but I just verified that it does it - even with the mouse plugged directly in.

Anyone know what's going on ?
 
Anything interesting in /var/log/Xorg.0.log (or the startx output)?
 
Not that I can recall - there were multiple reference counts to a font type and a few warning messages that didn't look to out of the ordinary. Since posting this, I have started a reinstall of 7.1 from scratch. I will try again and post output from x server startup if this problem repeats itself. I did install gnome and didn't notice the problem with that window manager - but that installation caused me all sorts of other dependency issues - which is why I going to start again.
 
The short ending to the story. (I am learning here, so bear with me). After a few email exchanges with the ports section of the formum, I managed to upgrade all my ports to the latest version. this was actually for another reason other than the mouse problem I originally had which stemmed from recursive effort to build something else which had had many dependencies.

Once I did that and spent a few hours yesterday getting all versions in sync (using portmaster and portupgrade). I am now running xorg-7.4.1 instead of the older version that was installed with the freebsd 7.1 release.

After all ports was syncrhonized, I ran X after a reboot. Guess what ? No mouse and no keyboard at all- where in the previous release, it autodetected everything correctly. (but I still had the intermittent problem).

So, after following advice of looking at the /var/log/Xorg.log file, I found that it it needed HAL to get keyboard and mouse devices. I have no idea why or why it did not need it with the release version. At any rate, I modified /etc/rc.conf to start HAL and dbus. (from a reference I found on the freebsd gnome website for installing gnome on BSD). I have not researched Hal to to understand what it actually does, but ALL my problems now seem to be fixed. I am happily running the latest X and the mouse/keyboard and window manager (which is fluxbox at the moment) seems to be working PERFECTLY.

Note when I tried to resolve building xorg, I did run into problems with the video-vga and video-via drivers not building because they were marked at BROKEN in the ports tree. I deinstalled those and I am not sure if I need them (or ever will). After deinstalling, I did a make clean install on the xorg server for good measure because I am not sure if I would get an unresolved or not without the drivers. Also there were some issues with a perl XML parser being needed and I had to manually build a port for this to get everything to build for things that depended on it.

Other than that, my ports tree is completely up-to-date (minus a few things that have been removed like xorg-protos and xphelloword - which don't sound important.

This is a little longer exercise than I expected :)...But I have found that everything else that I have built since then went flawlessly (ex: openbox did not build before).

Maybe someone can explain to me the benefits of going with the current xorg-7.4.1 - and what I would expect if I keep my ports tree up to date and upgrade to newer versions ? Right now my plan is to pretty much stay away from gnome or kde because of all the dependencies - ie keep it simple.
 
Just keep an eye on /usr/ports/UPDATING. It will contain vital clues when something major changes. The Xorg 7.3 -> 7.4 update was one of those major ones. FWIW it wasn't as bad as 6.9 -> 7.1 ;)

Xorg now depends on HAL as you've figured out. The main reason is to allow xorg to auto-detect most, if not all, hardware where in the past you had to enter everything in xorg.conf. It's the way forward I guess if we want everything to automagically work.
 
k2msmith said:
.. and spent a few hours yesterday getting all versions in sync (using portmaster and portupgrade) ...
Click to expand...

Do not use them together for upgrading ports. Portupgrade's database (pkgdb.db) contains no knowledge about what portmaster does or has done, which could make it upgrade ports that have already been upgradeded, or lose track of dependencies. You'll end up running pkgdb -F more often than you'll like, and there's a chance it won't be able to recover from schizofrenia/split brain syndrome.
 
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