Well after a long freaking time of trying to get away from microsoft, I end back up on Windows XP posting this with IE . I am posting this because I need to vent, and I am really hoping there is someone out there that can give me an answer, but thats unlikely. About a year ago I started looking into different Linux distro's. I downloaded slackware, gentoo, and fedora. Out of those three, slackware was my favorite because it was simple and to the point. Well I got discouraged when I was changing what seemed to be unimportant settings at the time. ( Can't remember what they were, been awhile) Anyway when I rebooted I got a panic, and couldn't get slackware to boot back up. I could not figure out how to recover or repair my install so I got frusterated and just reinstalled Windows.

About a month ago I downloaded and install FreeBSD on a junk computer I had laying here and man I was impressed! I mean it installed so quickly I couldn't believe it had installed properly. When I rebooted I was seriously exepecting alot of errors, but it ran just fine. As time went on I kept reinstalling it and reinstalling apache, mysql, php, etc.. just to get the hang of it. I am a huge fan of BSD now because its so simple. So just 2 days ago I decided it was time to install the latest release ( 5.2.1 I think.) So I got it installed and it all went as expected, up until the mouse part. This is where I always run into some problems, but with FreeBSD its like I am in a shoebox under 10 ft of sand. I just can't seem to get it working! Its really disappointing because I am so ready to throw my XP cd into a brick wall! Ok enough of my ranting I suppose I will tell the poor soul reading this my specs.

System is a HP Pavilion ze4430us Laptop
AMD 2400XP Mobile
512 DDR 266
40 GB Drive ( 20GB For Windows / 10 For Media / 10 For FreeBSD)
National Semiconducter On board 10/100 Network
802.11b/g On Board Wireless ( Not concerned bout that right now)
Has a touchpad that I am not using at this point.
Logitech MX700 Duo / USB

I cannot get the mouse to work for nothing. I have plugged it into the USB port, tried using the PS/2 pigtail deal, nothing.

I have tried:
moused -t auto -p /dev/sysmouse

moused -t auto -p /dev/usm0

moused -t auto -p /dev/psm0

None returned Errors, None work. dmesg shows that the kernel recognizes my Logitech receiver, keyboard, and mouse, but the mouse does not work at all. Keyboard works but if I type fast then I get some weird stuff going on. It seems like it throws out the character I typed half a second ago out a again? I am getting discouraged again and I would really like someones opinion on what I should do! I don't want to go out and get another keyboard and mouse because this set is awesome, its just BSD that don't like me. Sorry for a long post, but my blood pressure is getting higher and higher with failing attempt!

Did you try this ?

nope but ill try right now!

bleh. nope, nothing at all. In fact, I don't have MAKEDEV anywhere on my system. When I do man makedev it tells me its obsolete due to devfs? Also I did not find a usb1 in my /dev directory. I did however find usbdevs and it reported my hub, and under that my USB Reciever. Obviously my reciever works because my keyboard works ( Although it is really irritating when I type and everything I type gets so screwed up from the repeating of characters I typed two buttons ago! Dont know whats going on. Maybe this is a sign from Bill Gates and I am just a prisoner I have no idea. Its quite depressing though.

by the way thanks for tryin!

That happens to me late at night. It takes me a post or two to start paying attention. Yes, there is no MAKEDEV on RELENG_5, due to devfs (D'oh!).

If I were you, I'd post to the freebsd mailing lists. I'm an old fashioned guy (bought my first USB mouse this year), so I'm not really a lot of help in this area. The thing I can tell you though is that I know from searching for your problem that most people just plug it in and go (most problems on the net were with the scrollwheel mapping). I'm betting that if you post to freebsd-questions@ and freebsd-mobile@ that between the two of them, they'll get you fixed up (start on questions and don't cross post. People *will* yell at you )

I had a problem with a USB mouse on FreeBSD 5.2.1 as well and I never did get it working (even with the PS/2 adaptor). It did work on Mandrake Linux, though. I was told by my friends that the same mouse did work on OpenBSD, but I was installing it for a friend as a desktop, so I didn't try OpenBSD.

One other note, if you really did install 5.2.1, why don't you try 5.3 before you give up? FreeBSD 5.3 is the latest stable release.