|
| Ben Ketcham wrote:
| > 
| > Although the DEC "puck mice" certainly have appeal from a historical/Jetsons
| > angle, it will be extremely useful to be able to use 15$US generic PC mice
| > with Vaxen.  What about using them with one of the *other* serial ports in
| > a system, if such are available?  Should then be possible to use a PC mouse
| > with *no* additional software, just the regular serial driver (given an X
| > server that can use /dev/whatever for mouse input), right?  Someone correct
| > me if it is more complicated, I don't see why it should be.  (OK, you'd have
|
| You *do* need additional software.  The mouse sends bytes to the
| system.  You need some software to interpret what they mean and place
| the corresponding mouse events into an event queue.  The QDSS and QVSS
| drivers do this for a DEC mouse attached on the mouse serial port on the
| QDSS or QVSS.   Keyboard events go into the same queue.    
|
| There are two ways to make PC mice work:
| 1) Alter the drivers in the kernel
| This should be reasonably easy, at least if you're still using the mouse
| port on the display board for input.  If you want to use another port
| then various other issues arise, such as how you're going to redirect
| the data.
| 2) Alter X

I was thinking of, essentially, option "2)" above, if option "3)",
being "X already supports this on Vaxen", was not available.

| Hmm... I wonder if you could just use some code from XFree86.

This is more-or-less what I was wondering about when I said "given an
X server that can use /dev/whatever...".  With XFree86, as I'm sure
most people know, it looks by default for /dev/mouse.  You just make
that a link to the serial device (/dev/tty<foo>) which your serial
mouse is on, or you can use /dev/psaux or something for PS/2 mice,
etc.; I don't know what is really under the hood with this, but I
always assumed that you could probably point this at any (character)
device you wanted, as long as it spit out raw bytes that matched
what was expected for the given mouse protocol.  I admit that I have
not tried to do this in real life...

So if the available X server(s) for Vaxen don't handle arbitrary
devices for mouse input, then OK, the "*no* additional software"
part isn't true.  But still, the software hacking to use the
*standard* serial ports instead of the strange DEC mouse port,
might be easier than the hardware and software hacking needed
to use the DEC port.  Just a thought.

|
| > to be a little sick as well as pretty confident to give up the console
| > serial port for this, and even if you could establish the serial rate and
| > protocol the mouse wanted, I suppose you might have to do some cable wiring
|
| You don't really need the console port if you're running with a
| graphical console.  However, the MicroVAX II console port is a very poor
| excuse for a serial port.  It sucks so much that pasting a bit of text
| causes it to lose characters.  I don't know if it'd work very well.

Probably not: as I said, I'd tend to want to use some other serial port
instead if available.  Does the console support flow control?  I thought
it did.  In any case, dropping a few mouse characters might not be too
noticeable...

--ben