Hardware weirdness

[vakkotaur]

Earlier this month I swapped KVM switches and a pointer weirdness went away. It came back. And it stayed. I've cycled power on both computer & KVM and the jumpy pointer stayed jumpy. I swapped out USB-PS/2 converters and things still stayed jumpy.

I gave up and used the trackball I had been using with the laptop. That trackball is PS/2 for real, no silly USB converter needed. That one also is working just fine. I'm using it now and all seems well.

Just to see if it would work, I plugged the USB-PS/2 trackball into caspian the laptop and brought that up. Son of a Gunn diode, it works right and isn't jumping around the screen like an overcaffeinated squirrel. Evidently there's just something about the combination of belgian's hardware, a KVM, and a USB-PS/2 converter that makes things goofy.

Fortunately things worked out with just swapping stuff around. At least I didn't need to spend any money to get things working as I expect them to.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I have had issues with USB mice working on some hardware and not others. Since the OS versions were slightly different too, I can't say for sure whether it was the software or the mouse that caused the problem. In all cases, a native PS/2 mouse was stable and reliable.

I do think USB has been overloaded in an attempt to make it the universal interface to everything, even when doing so really solves no particular problem.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I'd rather have had another real PS/2 trackball, but they weren't available when I had need of another trackball so I wound up with the USB trackball and adapter. I understand the appeal of going USB, but agree it hasn't been done as well as it could be.

The adapted trackball used to work fine, even with the other KVM switch. But since then there have been a few changes and I don't know which one messed things up or if it was just aging components. Now belgian has a firewire card, a USB 2.0 card, and Fedora Core 4 rather than Mandrake. The other machine, percheron had no trouble with the adapted trackball.

I tried to install Fedora on percheron and ran into video issues. After the install there are some "first boot" questions in text, but evidently Fedora (and therefore CentOS, too) doesn't play well with percheron's video card and the text (not a GUI) was dot & line gibberish. After several tries with varying options, I've given up on Fedora and CentOS on that machine, at least for now.