mouse freezing and other problems

[David Johnston]

Hi,

I have just tried to install YDL 2.2 on a G4, and to my delight, it 
all appeared to go reasonabvly OK for a couple of days (an 
"everything" install with KDE) before disaster struck (see 1 below). 
A have a few install/config/setup problems that have been puzzling me 
and for which I would be grateful for feedback/advice as I can't find 
answers in the YDL book, my "running redhat" book or on the lists.

1.
I am using a contour 3 button mouse, it is recognised in the boot 
sequence and functioned fine for a couple of days. Then yesterday, 
the KDE screensaver kicked in for what I believe was the first time 
and when I returned, the mouse was frozen in the middle of the 
screen. I could use the keyboard to launch apps like Konsole, no 
problems, but the mouse itself remained locked in position, despite 
shutdown and rebooting several times, running setup to reconfirm as a 
USB mouse etc. In the end I wiped the install HD and am about to 
reinstall from scratch (and disable the screensaver ASAP, even though 
this may be a coincidence). So a couple of questions (1) anyone else 
experienced anything siilar and found a workaround? (2) how can I 
kill and restart the mouse driver (is it a case of listing the 
processes, finding the mouse one and killing it? (3) how "plug and 
play" is YDL. I tried swapping USB ports, adding another USB mouse 
etc but still it remained locked up

2.
My graphics card (ATI rage 128) is detected OK and my default screen 
(Mitsubishi diamond pro 87TXM) is listed in the Xconfigurator setup 
menu, but no matter what resolution I selected (from the simple 
configuration option), there was always a variable size of blank 
screen (several cm) all around the KDE desktop. I swapped over to, 
and configured for an Apple studio display and with this, KDE filled 
the entire screen no problems. As I would like to use the diamond 
pro, might a custom monitor setup cure this?

3. Slightly related to the above, I couldn't get Xconfigurator to run 
from the KDE desktop menus (I was logged in as root, and could run it 
from the Konsole). This appeared to be simply that the shortcuts on 
the menus appeared to be looking for xconfigurator rather than 
Xconfigurator. Short of making an alias, can I edit the entries in 
KDE menus to point at the correct program (and how?) A minor point 
but irritating.

3. On KDE startup I got a couple of sound error messages
"Sound Server informational message
Error whilst initialising the sound driver
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (no such device)
The sound server will continue using the null output device"
and
"Error whilst initialising the sound driver
SNDCTL-DSP-SETFMT failed  - invalid arguement
The sound server will continue using the null output device"
The CD player app runs and recognises an audio CD, but no sound 
ensues. (I have the std apple DVDrom drive). Can't stand silence, so 
any ideas at all on this are gratefully appreciated.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions on any of the above.





-- 
David A. Johnston,
Secretary to the WHO Schistosoma Genome Network,
Biomedical Parasitology Division,
Dept. of Zoology,
The Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, England, UK.

Tel: 020-7942-5566/5008/5152
Fax: 020-7942-5347
(from outside the UK: 44-20-7942 ****)
eMail daj@nhm.ac.uk

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/schisto/

The  Biomedical Parasitology Division is a WHO Collaborating Centre 
for the identification of schistosomes and their snail hosts.

Now at The Natural History Museum: Predators (until 6 May 2002)
Coming Soon: Turbulent Landscapes (opens 19 April 2002), Dino-Birds: The
Feathered Dinosaurs of China (opens 18 July 2002, Phase One of the new
Darwin Centre (opens September 2002)