Re: I've thought better of Linux

Tim X <timx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>With some mice, you can get complications arising between gpm (the
>mouse driver for the text consoles) and X. When I had some problems
>with an optical mouse, I found the solution was very simple. All I had
>to do was follow advice from the gpm man pages on setting up gpm to
>use 'raw' mode. Check the gpm HOWTOs and google and I'm sure you find
>a straight forward solution. Alternatively, try disabling/turning off
>gpm before starting X.

Ah. I have seen the same with a Dell mouse on Fedora 3. The same setup
works on FreeBSD (both Fedora and FreeBSD use the X.org server)
without problems. Thanks for the hint.

>> 2. Cut and paste do not work in the applications that I use
>> (eg. paste a URL or text between Emacs and Firefox).
>
>I suspect this is also due to a misconfigured mouse. As mentioned,
>either its interference between gpm and the X mouse driver or you have
>not configured the mouse driver correctly in XF86Config. Is the scroll

No, this has nothing to do with the hardware. The problem is, that
there is no standard cut&paste mechanism on X11, so there exist about
a handful or more, with most toolkits implementing more than one.
Traditional X clients (like xterm) afaik use cut buffers, some others
use the CLIPBOARD selection (I guess that's an atom named so in the X
server), and newer toolkits like GTK seem to use yet another method,
called XDND. Emacs seems to put stuff just in cut buffers, and GTK
seems to only support XDND and selections (note that this is guesswork
from observation, I'm not really interested in how this mess works),
so for example you cannot paste text from Emacs into a thunderbird
composer window (or vice versa, sometimes). Xemacs does it a bit
differently, and there cut&paste works better. Presumably it's also
storing selections in the CLIPBOARD selection, or in some other
mechanism, or reading from them. I've found that one solution is to
use the xclipboard(1) program, which comes with X11, as a kind of
indirection, when cut&paste doesn't work at all. In the case of emacs
vs. Mozilla, I tend to blame GTK, since it doesn't seem to support the
"traditional" methods and instead insists on cooking its own stuff.

There's an older "standard" (ICCCM) and a newer one (freedesktop.org)
for resolving such ("inter-client communications") issues, with the
earlier having found wide acceptance, whereas proposals including XDND
on freedesktop.org seem to be restricted to Gnome+KDE atm (but offer
more features).

mkb.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Ive thought better of Linux
    ... >> mouse driver for the text consoles) and X. ... >> to do was follow advice from the gpm man pages on setting up gpm to ... > like Windows or MacOS is not to use the desktop software? ... Its one of the things I like about X and Linux, ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: psmouse: synaptics (2.6.0-test1|2)
    ... > if that's true I'll try to help you to use code from gpm where possible. ... The kernel driver is supposed to export ... Note that the kernel driver only reports changes, ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: woody newbie help
    ... >Is there a console mouse test and trouble-shooting utility? ... It sounds like you have gpm running, which is the mouse driver for the ... iface eth0 inet dhcp ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: MS Intellimice optical shutting down anyone?
    ... Andre Costa wrote: ... > forth from console) won't work without gpm, ... > starting up gpm when I switch to console. ... It could be that your mouse driver is having issues now. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Toolbar
    ... If its really emacs in an xterm window, then you can access the menu ... with the F10 key or with `M-x tmm-menubar'. ... I assume you're not in an X session and you're talking about gpm mouse ... you need to install gpm support for emacs ...
    (comp.emacs)