[CentOS] mouse issues in centos 4

Thu May 26 19:23:23 UTC 2005
Mark Elam <melam at mobilygen.com>

Hi all,

I am the IT department here at my office,  I take care of everything
pretty much.  I chose Centos4 to deploy to my 50 workstations as it was
the most compatible with the RHEL.  We need the RHEL compatibility for
support contract for different tools we use.  So far it has been great. 
I have noticed a few issues since having 50 machines all exactly the
same installed with centos 4.  I have them clustered, and generally they
work well.

I often see random loss of the mouse cursor, which results in having to
restart X.  (really pisses the engineers off)  I cannot seem to track
down why this is happening.  Nothing in any logs give any clue to what
is happening.   I thought it may have to do with VMware, as this is
installed on 80% of these machines, and most of the time it happened
when users were using Vmware.  But recently I have seen the problem on
machines without VMware running or even installed.

I have also noticed a similar issue with a Wacom tablet.  The user will
be using it for some amount of time and then it stops working.  At first
it is assigned /dev/input/event3, the kernel module (wacom.o) is loaded
and everything is fine.  It will then stop working after a while, behind
the scenes the system thinks the tablet has been unplugged and
replugged, then assigns it /dev/input/event4.  This of course doesn't
work because in the xorg.conf file it is looking for it at event3.  

I am not sure if these are related or not.  But the symptoms seem
similar.  Of course the wacom tablet is USB and the mouse issues are
with PS/2 mice.  So they may be unrelated.  


Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks for your time.

-- 
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Mark Elam                                               Direct:  408.869.4029
IT Administrator                                        Cell:    408.221.2689
Mobilygen Corporation                                    melam at mobilygen.com
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