How to enable USB mouse with Fedora Core 2

[Mark Eggers]

I had (may still have) some issues with a Logitech USB optical wheel
mouse on Fedora Core 2.  My experiences may or may not be useful to you.

System:

Dell 8200
768 MB memory
2.0 GHz P4

NVidia 5200 with 256 MB memory
  (patiently waiting for the NVidia driver)

80 GB Maxtor (NTFS - Windows/2000 Professional)
60 GB Western Digital (Swap, boot, root - Fedora Core 2)
SONY CRX230  R/W CDROM

Sound Cards
  Intel 82801BA AC'97 (disabled in BIOS)
  Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (CS46xx with Yamaha XG50 daughter card)

USB
  82891BA/BAM USB Hub #1 (Intel)
  82891BA/BAM USB Hub #2 (Intel)

USB Devices
  Dell USB 7HK Keyboard
  Dell USB Keyboard Hub
  USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (Logitech MX500 Optical Mouse)

First of all, I upgraded the BIOS on the motherboard.  It turns out that
I was 4 revisions behind (oops).

This happened to solve another "problem" in that ALSA was seeing an
on-board Intel sound card even though it was disabled in the BIOS
settings.  This didn't happen in Fedora Core 1 using ALSA.

I then have this alias in /etc/modprobe.conf

alias usb-controller uhci-hcd

Without this alias I can access neither the mouse nor the keyboard.

I have also disabled the console mouse support in init 3, although with
the upgraded BIOS I may try enabling it again.  I normally work at init
5 in KDE, so mouse support in init 3 is not a big deal for me.

With all of that, I get the following messages via dmesg:

usbcore: registered new driver hiddev
usbcore: registered new driver hid

USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v2.2
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1f.2: UHCI Host Controller
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1f.2: irq 11, io base 0000ff80
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1f.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 1-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1f.4: UHCI Host Controller
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.4 to 64
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1f.4: irq 9, io base 0000ff60
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1f.4: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 2-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using address 2
hub 1-1:1.0: USB hub found
hub 1-1:1.0: 3 ports detected

usb 1-2: new low speed USB device using address 3
input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [B16_b_02 USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse]
  on usb-0000:00:1f.2-2
usb 1-1.1: new full speed USB device using address 4
input: USB HID v1.00 Keyboard [NMB Dell USB 7HK Keyboard]
  on usb-0000:00:1f.2-1.1
input,hiddev96: USB HID v1.00 Device [NMB Dell USB 7HK Keyboard]
  on usb-0000:00:1f.2-1.1

I will occasionally get the following messages:

Jun 11 08:49:28 phoenix kernel: drivers/usb/input/hid-input.c: event
field not found

Also, there seems to be a race condition on boot that I cannot reliably
reproduce.  Sometimes there is no response from the keyboard and I will
have to reboot twice on going from Windows/2000 to Fedora Core 2.  This
hasn't happened since upgrading the BIOS, but then again it appears to
be a race condition . . . so who knows.

In short:

1) Upgrade to the latest firmware software (BIOS, other motherboard
   chips)

2) Make sure that the following is in /etc/modprobe.conf

   alias usb-controller uhci-hcd

3) Turn off console mouse support if you are at init 5

4) Hope you won't get a race condition for the keyboard

I found items 1) and 2) to be absolutely necessary to get my USB
keyboard and mouse to work.  As has been pointed out in the list
already, getting USB support correct in the BIOS is not a trivial task. 
Earlier revisions of your BIOS may have problems that the newest version
of Fedora now uncovers.

/mde/
just my two cents . . .