Fedora 10 x86_64 Live CD install on Dell Inspiron 1501 -- Erratic mouse pointer

slashslash · #1 6th January 2009, 04:12 AM

Last week I installed Fedora 10 x86_64 from a Live CD on my Dell Inspiron 1501 with AMD Turion X2 processor. The system has 1GB ram and 120GB hard drive. The laptop has the Broadcom 4311 wireless card so wireless did not initially work. I enabled the rpmfusion repository and installed the broadcom_wl package. This resulted in the wireless coming on only ocasionally; after most boots the wireless LED does not come on. I had a Ralink rt2870 usb wireless card handy so I will use this until I can buy an internal Intel wireless card from ebay. I will be using this system to study Linux and Java so the first software I installed was Sun's Java SDK and the Eclipse IDE. This system is working great except that sometimes the mouse pointer will jump back and forth acrossed the screen and will not respond properly to the trackpack. I have saved this problem for last because I am least familiar with it and I was not able to find a solution as I have always been able to do with any other Linux problem I've had.

slashslash · #2 6th January 2009, 06:17 AM

Specifically I am asking how I might go about diagnosing and fixing the problem with the mouse.

slashslash · #3 7th January 2009, 09:39 PM

It is disappointing that something as minor as a mouse cursor can ruin what would otherwise be a delightful environment. I know I can go buy an external mouse and plug it in right next to my external wireless adapter. Perhaps what is more disappointing is how hard it is to get Linux to work properly. After fiddling with my wireless adapter for a week I came to the realization that it would be much easier and I would waste far less time if I just installed a compatible wireless adapter. I've been using Linux exclusively for about 2 years now and have yet to have a system that everything worked on. This laptop is 7 years newer than my last one and I was very much looking forward to having a nice machine to work on. Help would be greatly appreciated.

lauwers · #4 8th January 2009, 01:11 PM

Used a wireless mouse and keyboard nearly as long as they exist , but always as one set has never a problem.
Depending on the GUI you use there always somewhere a option to configure the mouse and
keyboard if necessary .

slashslash · #5 9th January 2009, 07:03 AM

Well I decided to try an alternate driver for the synaptic trackpad in this Inspiron 1501. I removed the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics.x86_64 driver that was on the system and installed tpconfig.i386. During boot a message was given about some fatal error that had something to do with a ps/2 port. Now I had no trackpad. No way to control the mouse.

This led to the problem of not being able to control the network manager to connect to the wireless network so I could reinstall the synaptics driver. I couldn't connect with an ethernet cable either because I didn't know how to control the network manager and I don't know the shell command to give to connect. So I got a $10 usb optical mouse and it works perfectly. It was at this time that I learned from the previous owner of the laptop that the trackpad was not working properly under Windows Vista either so I suspect a hardware problem (he described the exact same problem behavior).

Just to be clear I left the synaptics driver uninstalled since the trackpad doesn't work properly. I also went ahead and removed the broadcom-wl driver since the internal wireless only comes on ocassionally. The Ralink rt2870 usb wireless adapter I am using works fine. Installation was as simple as yum install rt2870. I intend to install a compatible internal Intel wireless card soon. I will post about how that goes.

That leaves me with Fedora 10 x86_64 runing great on my Dell Inspiron 1501.