2 Keyboards and 2 Mice

Calum · 10-21-2002, 05:02 AM

okay. I have not searched for this yet, and i am sorry if it has been done to death. If it's been covered before then i am more than happy for somebody to post a link rather than waste their time answering. i think though that, while simple, my issue is quite specific. here goes then!

i have a laptop with linux mandrake 9.0 on it. i also have an external "microsoft" optical wheel mouse (USB) and an external compaq "bunch-of-extra-keys-along-the-top" keyboard (PS/2).
At present, the mandrake 9.0 knows about the USB mouse and the laptop keyboard. It does not know about the laptop's built in glidepoint mouse/pointer thing, nor have i introduced it to the external keyboard.

How do i set up the system so that linux will automatically use whichever device is or is not present please. I want to make it so that the external mouse and keyboard will be used if they are there, but that the onboard keyboard and mouse will work fine if the external ones are not there. Also, is there some way to turn on or off the onboard keyboard and pointer on the fly, so that i could sometimes have both keyboards 'on' and sometimes have only the external one 'on' (with the internal one disabled)?

thanks very much indeed in advance. i know this is probably quite simple to answer but i don't know how, so maybe somebody who does can point me to a link or explain it. thanks again.......

[edit]oh yes. one more thing. the keyboards have different layouts. the onboard one is a US keyboard, and the external one is a UK keyboard, so how do we sort it out so the system knows which is which?
thanks again...

Calum · 10-21-2002, 09:19 AM

^bump^

look, i know it sounds boring but seriously can't anybody just provide a link?

i posted this hours ago and it has received ONE view. and that was me!

Calum · 10-21-2002, 11:00 AM

ok i can take a hint. you needn't think i'll be posting the answer here for anybody else's benefit when i find out though...

(well alright i might, but i don't think there would be any point, since i don't think anybody would read it!

)

Thymox · 10-21-2002, 05:33 PM

Temper, temper!

I'm not sure about being able to switch on-the-fly, but if you had multiple XF86Config files, you could write a little script to swap between them when you type startx.

Just a thought

Calum · 10-22-2002, 08:37 AM

thank you very much!
so are the keyboards set up in X then? or just the mouse?
and i don't really have a bad temper!

Thymox · 10-22-2002, 09:02 AM

I'm not sure how you would change it for your particular setup, but these are the sections that would most likely need changing:

Code:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Keyboard1"
    Driver "Keyboard"
    Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
    Option "XkbOptions" ""
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Mouse1"
    Driver "mouse"
    Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
    Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "layout1"
    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
    Screen "screen1"
EndSection