Re: FC5 on a Laptop --- disabling hardware

[text rewrapped for readability]

I demand that Carlos Moreno may or may not have written...

but in addition to annoy me, I have a strong suspicion that it's making
my system unstable --- in the last week alone, I have had to PUSH THE
POWER BUTTON to recover from a complete GUI freeze in three occasions
--- in some of the cases, the USB mouse that I put froze first, and I
could still use the Notebook mouse pad, and then a few clicks later the
entire machine froze (utterly and hopelessly frozen! I had to power it
off and on again!) --- which is why I suspect it may have something to
do with it.
I have no problem at all with the touchpad here. Are you sure that it
isn't something else? Kernel bug, perhaps?

Indeed I'm not sure at all --- as I said, I have the suspicion (and even
labelling as "strong suspicion" was perhaps an overstatement) ... I got a
bit suspicious about it because it doesn't seem to work well (but it is the
exact same case with the WinXP that came with the Laptop <grrrrrr!!!!>),

It fails there too? I'd start suspecting dodgy hardware (but it may be worth
checking for a BIOS update first in case that's the problem).

and also because in most of the instances of GUI-freeze-up, I do notice
strange details about the mouse pointer. (working with one mouse but not
the other one, etc.)

Anything unusual in the logs? (Alt-SysRq-S should help by flushing pending
writes to disk.)

As the other poster said, maybe X is having trouble dealing with two active
pointing devices simultaneously?

Possible; OTOH, it should cope well with that. (Apparently 7.2's better still
in that it handles device hotplugging.)

[snip]
Assuming that the BIOS is sufficiently similar, Fn-F9 should disable it.

I assume you mean once it's booted and operating? Yes, I see the grayish
icon on the F9 key, and it looks like an Enable/Disable mouse... However,
it does not work here (I'm typing precisely on my notebook right now;
tried it, but the touchpad still moves the mouse pointer --- did I
misunderstand? Is it something I need to do at POST, before boot, etc.?

I don't think that it matters much when, once the BIOS has handed control to
the boot loader.

At least I guess on the WinXP (on those rare occasions when I need to
switch to it) the trick should work.

Hmm. It should work anyway, AFAICS...

should also be able to enable and disable it via the omnibook module; see
http://sourceforge.net/projects/omnibook/.)

I'll take a look at it, if the suggestion of the other poster (thanks
Unruh!) with xorg.conf doesn't work (the xorg.conf sounds simpler :-))

.... actually, that feature seems to be disabled for my laptop due to the BIOS
side of things working properly (and my having reported this). But enabling
it should be fairly straight-forward; and it should be enabled by default if
your laptop isn't recognised by the module.

--
| Darren Salt | linux or ds at | nr. Ashington, | Toon
| RISC OS, Linux | youmustbejoking,demon,co,uk | Northumberland | Army
| + Generate power using sun, wind, water, nuclear. FORGET COAL AND OIL.

I will make you shorter by the head.
.