Making Mouse Wheels Work w/ a KVM?

Elvii asks: "My mouse wheel doesn't want to work through my KVM. It doesn't work in X11 under Linux (Debian 3.0, kernel 2.4.20), but it works in Windows on same machine, through same KVM, so that tells me it's a protocol or driver issue , which is beyond me. I have no other OS's to test on, although I read online that FreeBSD can handle the mouse wheel in this type of setup. When I set the mouse type to IMPS/2, it just twitches in corner and randomly clicks. Anyone know if it's a kernel issue or an X11 issue? I've googled and found nothing of real use there - just that some KVMs work and some don't. Plain PS/2 works but I want my wheel too." The kicker is that when the mouse is plugged directly to the machine, the mouse wheel works just fine! Has anyone else experienced the problem? What did you do to fix it?

Wheel mouse via USB KVM

[XDG]

This may not help your particular situation with your existing hardware, but I switched to a USB KVM switch (with a USB keyboard and USB wheel-mouse) and it works just fine in Windows 2000/XP and Redhat Linux (8.0). There are, of course, other issues with using a USB keyboard if you need boot-time support, but a modern PC motherboard should be able to handle it without much difficulty.

Best of luck,
XDG

Re:Here's my take

[elmegil]

This is pretty interesting, mostly because I have a related and perhaps backwards question. I have a logitech PS/2 TrackMan Wheel hooked to my Linksys 4-way KVM switch. I have a windows game machine (win98se), a linux router/firewall (mouse irrelevant), a Sun sparcstation (wheel irrelevant), and an occasional Linux machine hooked up.

The Linux machine has ALWAYS recognized my wheel, regardless--SuSE 7, SuSE 8, RH9, various hardware, and whether the mouse was "active" on the Linux box during boot or not. The windows machine, however, only recognizes the wheel when I am NOT "active" on that machine during its boot. If I switch away, power on, wait until the blinkenlights stop, switch back to it, the wheel works like a champ, but if I stay connected, it never does....

The PS2 mouse is the invention of Satan

[unitron]

Why is it that KVM switches have so few problems with PS2 keyboards and so many with PS2 mice? Why is it that you can hot swap PS2 keyboards but not PS2 mice? Was there anything wrong with serial mice that couldn't have been solved by adding another serial port on IRQ12? If not for PS2 mice many KVM switches could be the much less expensive passive type instead of the more expensive active types.

Can you tell that I have strong negative feelings about PS2 mice?

Re:Here's my take

[MrResistor]

Curious.

All I can say is that with all the KVM (and just KV) switches I deal with at work, everything works best if you boot the machine active. My QNX boxes are especially "sensative", if I don't boot them active I don't even get the extra keys on the keyboard (arrow keys, 10-key pad, etc.).

I have yet to encounter a KVM switch that truely works as advertised. Then again, my company doesn't buy the good ones.

Fix:

[mikh]

Logitech mouse? Most KVM's support only MS Mouse wheel mode, and not Logitech one. You need to switch your mouse it to Microsoft Wheel mode.

Download imwheel rpm... It includes little utility called setimps2. Put call to setimps2 to your /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, at the very top (before it starts gpm)

In X86Config under mouse put

Protocol "IMPS/2"
Device "/dev/mouse"
ZAxisMapping 4 5

That fixed it for me, until I switched to Logitech laser mouse, which defaults to MS mouse protocol instead of Logitech one, which works fine without this fix.

Driver issue

[Ben Jackson]

I suspect that the KVM initializes the mouse as a generic PS/2 mouse and then pretends to BE a mouse for each computer it is connected to. The KVM is probably ignoring the initialization that it receives (or at least ignoring the extended settings) rather than passing it on to the mouse.
So it's a driver issue in the sense that the KVM's dumb internal mouse driver is not enabling the mousewheel.

Mouse reset...

[hughk]

The main issue that someone else commented on is that wheel-mice have modes.

Every so often a wheel mouse under Linux seems to hang (i.e., not do anything) under RH 8 and 9. This isn't the system, it is some kind of confusion caused by the mouse. Switching virtual consoles away from X then back again seems to clean things up wonderfully.

What I would love to know is where is the mouse reset is being generated, i.e. is this X, /dev/mouse or what? Clearly Win either is sending out a periodic mouse reset or it waits for something to seem borked and does the reset automatically.