I spent a day on resolving this. Whenever I tried to start X (be it for configuration purposes with xf86cfg, or via 'startx'), my system froze. None of the input devices worked anymore (no keyboard and no mouse [not even numlock or contrl+alt+delete]), although I was able to enter the system via SSH - it didn't crash. I found out this was due to the following directive in /etc/X11/XF86Config: Option "Device" "/dev/mouse" I have an USB mouse, and no mouse attached to the PS/2 port. When I changed the above mentioned line to "/dev/usbmouse", it worked fine. No logfile entry had been made by X. My mouse got detected by the kernel, though, since in 'dmesg' it mentions the following: input0: USB HID v1.00 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical
I spent a day on resolving this. Whenever I tried to start X (be it for configuration purposes with xf86cfg, or via 'startx'), my system froze. None of the input devices worked anymore (no keyboard and no mouse [not even numlock or contrl+alt+delete]), although I was able to enter the system via SSH - it didn't crash. I found out this was due to the following directive in /etc/X11/XF86Config: Option "Device" "/dev/mouse" I have an USB mouse, and no mouse attached to the PS/2 port. When I changed the above mentioned line to "/dev/usbmouse", it worked fine. No logfile entry had been made by X. My mouse got detected by the kernel, though, since in 'dmesg' it mentions the following: input0: USB HID v1.00 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical®] on usb1:2.0 Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Issue 'startx', or anything that fires up X. Actual Results: I got a mouse cursor, that was it. The system freezed after that, and I was unable to perform any action on the local console until I rebooted. Expected Results: It should have given me a fully functional X-interface. :) I have a VIA chipset and an USB HUB, which I detached during the problem. I also detached every other USB device, without any result.
The mouse not working is standard behaviour as far as im concerned. If you have a USB mouse you should set the device as one of /dev/usbmouse or /dev/input/something depending on your USB devices. Unless of couse you have /dev/mouse set as a symlink to as USB mouse. The fact that the system locks up could mean other things. Generally if nothing is there the server just exits and fails. Reporter: Does this still happen with the latest XFree versions?
