> I've got a perfectly good Sun optical mouse (with the
> silver/blue-gridded pad), but I'd like to hang a plain old Microsoft
> serial mouse off one of the four com ports and use it instead.

What are "com ports"?  This is port-sparc, not port-i386, y'know. :-)

Suns normally have only two serial ports.  (The keyboard and mouse
ports bear some relation to ordinary serial ports, but only some - most
notably, the voltage levels are all different.)

> The optical mouse it runs presently just kinda bites.

Have you considered speeding it up?  I found that goosing mine from
1200 to 9600 made an _immense_ difference in usability.  (If the mouse
is sufficiently old, it can't be sped up, but unless you're using a
mouse of Sun-3-era vintage, it's unlikely you'll have that problem.)

If you still want to use a Microsoft serial mouse, your biggest
problems will probably be software.  I don't know the Microsoft mouse
protocol; if it's not the same as the Sun one, you'll either have to
hack on the X server (and anything else you want to use the mouse with)
to make it speak to your mouse, or you'll have to hack on the kernel
mouse driver to make it grok your mouse (in which case all the userland
software will Just Work, as it won't be able to tell the difference).

Personally, I'd go for the latter, but I've already had my fingers in
the mouse driver and am not afraid of diddling it further. :-)

> I looked for the Xconf file all over.  Docs on the web say Xf86conf
> which make sense for the Intel folks, but I have no such file and so
> can't edit it manually.

Right.  Unless, of course, you're using an XFree86 which someone has
hacked on sufficiently to make it speak to Sun hardware. :-)  I don't
think people have done that.

> Is there an analogue to XF86Config or XF86Setup for sparc I should be
> aware of?  Where is the X11R6 configuration file?

I don't think there _is_ any "X11R6 configuration file".  Not having to
deal with the hardware hell Intel boxen do, most architectures' X
servers have never had to evolve anything akin to XF86Config.

Indeed, IIRC Xsun has hardwired into the expectation that it shokuld
open /dev/kbd and /dev/mouse, machines with multiple keykboards/mice be
damned.  (I know this because when I added my kmmux code, I had to hack
on programs/Xserver/hw/sun/ to make it useful.)

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B