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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

For one of our keyboards, you need to have a mouse plugged in before using 
Xvesa or you will get a red pointer and a frozen keyboard.  The same 
keyboard (when not frozen) interprets the Numlock key as a tilde, in X.

We recently recycled a board with bad PS/2 and serial ports and since then 
my partner has been putting drmouse in autoexec.bat to test mice before 
installing linux.  It gives a message if no mouse found, PS/2 or serial.

We spent all day yesterday trying to get BL3.40 to run with Xvesa on two 
hard drives in three computers.  With kernel 2.2.26 or 2.2.16 we got the 
familiar two lines (repeated) after typing startx:  Interrupt pointer... 
[doesn't point at ROM?)] - flashed by quickly and then no vts were usable.
I could reboot Ctrl-Alt-Del (blind).

F5 at boot fixed the problem, so we tried various DOSes and booting 
without emm386 and himem.sys, which did not help.  Xvesa worked after 
booting from floppy disk with FreeDOS, Win98 DOS, DOS 7.1, but not from 
hard drive with our autoexec.bat file (modified for FreeDOS).

Xvesa worked on another computer and the only difference in files in 
memory was drmouse so my partner finally removed that and the problem was 
fixed.  ctmouse and Logitech mouse driver also interfere with Xvesa.

With kernel 2.4.31 on another computer, only the first vt is affected and 
the error message is different:
xinit:  No such file or directory (errno 2):  unexpected signal 13
_X11TransocketUNIXConnect:  Cannot connect:  errno=111
giving up

This repeats over and over and I cannot kill xinit - it tries again 
(because it is set up to respawn on this computer).  But with the usual 
inittab setup it should be possible to kill xinit and at least use console 
mode before you reboot again to DOS and linux.

Not loading ctmouse first eliminates the problem.

I have not tried with BL2 and any Xvesa, but I recommend that people 
unload any DOS mouse drivers before using Xvesa in the boot 
script.

We don't normally use a DOS mouse so never had the problem before.