Subject: Re: Scrolling Mice crash XdecNetBSD
To: Michiel Buddingh' <ajuin@stack.nl>
From: Michael G. Schabert <mikeride@mac.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 03/10/2005 15:56:22
At 12:44 PM +0100 3/10/05, Michiel Buddingh' wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I've recently acquired an AlphaServer 300 4/266 equipped with a nice
>ZLXP-E3, and I must say, NetBSD works like a charm on it.  However,
>and I suppose I have only myself to blame for mixing 'old' and 'new'
>hardware like this, scrolling the mouse invariably crashes XdecNetBSD
>(and XalphaNetBSD too, for that matter).

Yup, I reported the problem a couple years back, & noone really had 
anything to offer.

>Now, at the moment, I'm building xsrc in the vain hope that XFree86
>might be better equipped to handle such strange novelty mice, but is
>this at all a sane thing to do?  I've googled a bit on XFree86 on
>NetBSD/alpha, and the consensus seemed to be that XFree86 on alpha is
>a questionable solution at best, although I've read yet other claims
>that XFree86 had improved its support for non-Intel hardware in
>version 4.

Actually, Mel Kravitz has done quite a bit of work to make XFree86 
work well on the alphas, but I've generally stuck with XDecNetBSD for 
the same reason as XMacNetBSD and XMacPPC...they work perfectly fine 
without any config necessary. My hardware wouldn't really benefit 
from any existing features in XFree, so they are as bloat-free as X 
can get :).

>So, has anyone else encountered this problem?  Is there perhaps a way
>to configure XdecNetBSD not to crash?  Will XFree86 solve all my
>problems?  Or should I just go look for a PS/2 mouse without a
>scrollwheel?

I moved my mouse to a different machine & went with just a 3-button 
mouse on the Alpha. You can actually use the scroll mouse as a 
3-button mouse if you're careful to not rotate the wheel when pushing 
it in as the middle button.

Sorry,
Mike
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