> It's not just user programs.  The average user generally has no idea
> whether their mouse speaks the PS/2 mouse protocol or the Mouseman
> protocol or what.  They can probably figure out whether it's a serial
> or bus mouse if you tell them to check whether the connector in the
> back of the machine is round or rectangular.

Buy any ATX format motherboard manufactured in the last year or so.
There will be both PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports on it.

A mouse plugged into the PS/2 mouse port is clearly acting as a PS/2 mouse,
even if the box it came in says "PS/2 and serial mouse compatible".

> > For folks coming from Linux and/or FreeBSD (or other places, even)
> > this seems to be a fairly constant source of confusion,

For me, who came directly over after a full-time job using SunOS,
it was also a surprise. I purposely bought a PS/2 compatible mouse
(a) so I wouldn't have to use up a COM port and (b) because I _thought_
that a PS/2 mouse would be unambiguous and easy to configure! It wasn't.

What came of that proposal to re-enable /dev/pms0 in GENERIC? My -current
is a little over a week old, and its arch/i386/conf/GENERIC file still has
pms0 commented out.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com