Mark J Cox : Two heads better than one

mark :: blog

24 Jul 2004: Two heads better than one

So continuing the dual-head experiment I went and bought a USB mouse from PCWorld today. My new Microsoft USB mouse works better with Fedora Core 2 than Windows XP, which I find quite amusing. So now I can use the keyboard and mouse under the second display as well as the first, just by switching a single USB cable. I wanted to buy a KVM but no local shops had any USB versions. Anyway, the mouse that felt the nicest was this optical Microsoft USB mouse, and for under 20 pounds. Plugged the mouse into the hub built into the USB keyboard which was plugged into my Fedora 2 laptop. Immediately it was recognised, configured, and "just worked" at the same time as all the other pointing devices (the laptop has two and my USB keyboard has a mouse stick thing too). Time to make sure that the new mouse worked when I switched the keyboard over to my Windows XP machine. Well, I plugged it in and waited a bit, and waited. After a while Windows seemed to decide it was going to try and configure this new device, popped up a little window, copied some files around, and then the mouse worked. Amazingly when booting XP I can't move the pointer until some point when XP decides to configure the mouse. XP has a similar problem with my USB keyboard, refusing to let me push a key to abort a disk check if the system needs one at startup.

Created: 24 Jul 2004

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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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