Hi, i’m happy to finally be on Debian Planet.

Since all the dust around the X11 Licencing Chaos has now settled down, i’d like to point out a major usability problem with X11: Input devices.

In fact, Input Devices are what annoys me most with X11, i hope the people on freedesktop.org are already working on that.

Today, Input devices are a plug’n’play thing. Especially with notebooks, people want to plug in a mouse and just use it.

This only works due to a ugly hack: It’s called /dev/input/mice.

Since any newly added Mouse also outputs to this device, new mice will just work when this device is used.

But there is a big drawback: you cannot configure these mice differently.

And with Kernel 2.6, you PS/2 Mouse is also included in this device (note: when you upgrade and are wondering why your PS/2 mouse is twice as fast as before, you probably should drop the old psaux device from your X11 config)

And this really sucks: my external mouse has three mouse buttons and a scroll wheel. My IBM Thinkpad Stick has three mouse buttons, and i’d like to use the middle button for scrolling with the stick in absence of a wheel.

I could do that if i use /dev/input/mouse0 and /dev/input/mouse1 - but ONLY if my USB mouse was plugged in when i started X11. This SUCKS.

Ok, enough rant for today.