Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[kethd]

In a perfect world, you would boot Puppy, run the Mouse Wizard, make a mouse choice, power down, unplug the old mouse, plug in the new mouse, power up, and everything would be easy and fine.

But what if you find yourself stuck, with a mouse that is not responding?
How can you tell it to use the new mouse, if the cursor won't move?

By using the special key combination CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE you can abort out of X Windows to a command prompt. Then enter the command
# rm /etc/mousedevice
to remove your current mouse choice. Then enter
# xwin jwm
to start the X Windows GUI back up. It will ask you for new mouse choices -- Mouse Changed -- Success!

Be aware that it is not always safe to plug or even unplug computer attachments while the computer is turned on. This is called HOT-PLUGGING or HOT-SWAPPING. Some things like USB are designed for this, and in the case of a serial mouse it should be pretty safe, but PS/2 connections are definitely NOT designed for this. If you plug in PS/2 mouse, or even unplug one, with the power on things may not only not work temporarily, you could actually break you mainboard permanently! So when in doubt, turn everything off before making any equipment connection changes.

How to experiment with different types of Mouse on Puppy

Just attach them all at once (with the power off), start up Puppy, and experiment with the Mouse Wizard. Sometimes things may stop working, and you can learn how to recover. When you make changes, you will usually have to Exit to prompt and restart X Windows, or reboot, to get the change to take effect.

(Based on experiences 26nov05 on Compaq DP2000 P-233MMX desktop, Puppy 1.0.6)