Re: How to use mouse with mc in console

[Peter Hugosson-Miller <pehu im se>]

Björn Eriksson wrote:

> [No CC:s please, Mail-Followup-To: mc-devel gnome org]

OK, for original thread, see
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc/2002-April/msg00009.html

> Hi Peter, greetings from Göteborg,

And hi from a fellow Swede in Stockholm!

>  If you have reasons to believe it's a mouse/device/gpm-problem then
> there are perhaps better places to ask. I'm afraid I don't have any
> list-suggestions though.

I was just hoping this might be a situation that someone else might have seen
before, or there might be some way to get mc to print out debugging
information, so I can track the problem down. Now that I have it working on
one installation and not working on another, with no visible differences
(yet), it ought to be possible to compare them and see what is different.

>  A couple of thoughs: BTW, I assume you mean the *Linux* console.

Yes. No X is involved in this problem. On the system that doesn't work, X
isn't even installed - it's a bootable Debian CD-ROM, developed by Timo Benk
(who can't explain the problem either). Check out the project home page
http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/ for more details.

Timo was very careful to use just standard packages from woody (the up-coming
Debian release - available Real Soon Now TM). The whole system is loaded into
RAM, with (he believes) everything writeable that ought to be writeable.

>  [0. Why use a mouse? :) And from the console at that??]

The mouse is useful for select and paste operation in the console, and I like
it for mc too (I grew up on the Norton Commander, back in the early eighties,
so I'm used to using the mouse).

>  1. Are you running X at the same time? I think you are on the machine
> where it's working. (As /dev/gpmdata is the repeater pipe.)

No X installed at all (except on the machine where it's working). As you point
out, /dev/gpmdata should be a fifo, not a file, and Timo says that this will
be fixed in the next release. I have deleted the file, and let gpm (or
gpmconfig) re-create it, but it makes no difference to the situation. My guess
is that mc uses /dev/gpmctl to get its mouse input (but maybe someone else
knows better ;-).

>  2. It's not likely to be a mc problem. More likely a library problem
> since you've asserted that the mouse 'works' [the cursor moves and you
> can paste]. Have you tried any other console-apps like lynx, w3m, links?

Not yet, that will be my next step, then. Any idea which libraries might be
causing the problem, or a good place to start looking?

--
Best regards,

Peter Hugosson-Miller