Skip to content

Using a serial mouse via USB on OpenSolaris

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on

As noted in my previous blog posting, I manged to revive my old Logitech TrackMan Marble FX on Linux (openSuSE 11.1b4), using a Serial-to-USB dongle with a Prolific PL2303 chip. But I also use OpenSolaris on my Laptop quite frequently (currently testing the upcoming 2008.11 release), so I investigated if it would be possible to enable the trackball there as well.

Luckily, the Driver Manager listed the plugged in adapter and the correct driver (usbsprl) was loaded already. Now the real challenge was finding out which device node to use. Some research revealed that the driver actually comes with a manual page , which indicated that /dev/term/0 was the correct device name.

Lo and behold, I copied the InputDevice section from my Linux xorg.conf file into the OpenSolaris one, replaced the Device parameter with the appropriate one and restarted the X server. Immediate success! Now I can enjoy using my most favourite input device on OpenSolaris as well.

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
HTML-Tags will be converted to Entities.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

Form options
tweetbackcheck