Mouse drivers (rant)
My old scummy $10 mouse developed a problem with one of the buttons, and so a very nice friend donated me his old Microsoft Intellimouse (he's got some swish optical wireless thing now). I plugged the mouse in and started using it under Linux without thinking much more about it. However, on the rare occasions that I do use Windows, I noticed that the mouse wheel didn't work. Today I thought I'd fix that.

It appears that while my $10 trash mouse could fit its driver on a floppy disk, to get a Microsoft Intellimouse to run you either need the CD that comes with it, or a 10Mb download from Microsoft. 10Mb seemed to be a lot for a mouse-driver, but it rapidly became apparant that it included all their mouse drivers, plus pictures of all the mice, plus advertising materials, a swag of different EULAs, and a few system files.

Installing the software required two reboots of the machine. At the end, there's a walk-through showcase explaning how great your nice mouse is, filled with more pictures. It even shows you a picture of the mouse it's installed thd drivers for so you can compare it to the one sitting under your hand. Yup, that looks like my mouse.

Unfortunately, after all that, the wheel still doesn't work. The Microsoft Mouse Troubleshooting Page concludes that my PS/2 port is incompatible with the mouse's scroll function. Impressive that Linux is able to use the wheel without issue, given my hardware is supposedly broken.

The new drivers seem to be putting the mouse into a state where the wheel functions are disabled. How do I know? Because if I reboot into Linux from Windows without power-cycling the machine, the mouse shows all the symptoms of an incorrect driver (pointer jumps erratically and clicks erratically).

I suspect I'm going to see if there's a "generic ImPS/2 windows driver" out there, and use that rather than the 10Mb bundle of Microsoft stuff.