Thanks to all who replied to this posting. I have now got the
mouse working.
To summarise :
Support for PS/2 mouse is not in the kernel on the standard Debian boot
disk, either built in or as a module. Thus, to use a PS/2 mouse one has
to obtain a kernel with the required support. The special kernel 1 has
the neccessary psaux.o module, so obtaining the corresponding image
package, installing it, and adding "psaux" to the appropriate config
file (/etc/modules ? I can't remember) will do the job.
Ideally, however, I would have liked to compile a kernel which supported
the PS/2 mouse, as well as some other features of the GATEWAY 2000, such
as APM, and use that. I downloaded and installed the kernel source
package from 1.1.3, configured it, and tried to make the image by doing
./debian.rules
This did not work, however - the make failed (after the best part of an
hour had elapsed) when it was unable to find "as86". I could not find
as86 anywhere on my system, and so was stuck.
Am I doing something wrong, or is it the case that the kernel-source
package is flawed ?
BTW, when I tried to config under X with make xconfig, tk failed with a
complaint about there being no such colour as "gray" !?!? Any ideas here ?
Some suggestions :
- The default boot disk should have PS/2 mouse support
available as a module, since the PS/2 mouse seems a
reasonably common device, and new users will not be happy
if they have to go to great lengths just to get their mouse
working.
- The modules.tgz file on the special kernel 1 boot disk
is corrupted. If this was fixed I could have obtained the
module I needed by extracting it from this file.
- The apparent dependency of the kernel compilation procedure
on as86 should be resolved - if this file is neccessary then
it should be in one of the packages upon which the
kernel-source package depends.
Thanks again for everyone's help,
Mark Johnston.
