On Debian Planet / X11 and Input Devices
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.