General Information

Assuming you have a supported usb interface, being uhci, ehci, or ohci, and a usb hid mouse with or without a scroll wheel, this guide may or may not help you.

Configuration

Although most people report that their USB devices, including HID mice work out of the box on 5.x, I still recommend that you recompile your kernel to make sure everything works properly.

If you are still using a legacy release of FreeBSD you must recompile your kernel for USB mouse support.

Assuming you are using the x86 architecture, a standard chipset such as Sis, Via, or Intel, and have a USB 1.1-2 compliant host adapter, you first need to do the following:

# # #

cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf cp GENERIC HOSTNAME nano -w HOSTNAME

Make sure the following entries are present under the USB support portion of the configuration file:

/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/HOSTNAME # USB support device          uhci          # UHCI PCI->USB interface device          ohci          # OHCI PCI->USB interface device          ehci          # EHCI PCI->USB interface (USB 2.0) device          usb           # USB Bus (required) device          ugen          # Generic device          uhid          # "Human Interface Devices" device          ukbd          # Keyboard device          ums           # Mouse

Comment out the ehci entry if your motherboard doesn't have a USB 2.0 compatible interface.  Comment out the ukbd entry if you don't want support for usb keyboards.  Save the configuration file.

# # # # # #

/usr/sbin/config HOSTNAME cd ../compile/HOSTNAME make depend make make install reboot

Assuming you didn't disable the mouse daemon, once the system has booted, you should see a mouse pointer on the console which should be movable.

In order to setup xorg/x11 with your usb mouse, you should disable and kill the mouse daemon.  Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines to the bottom:

moused_enable="NO"

In the /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config file, under the InputDevice section, the following should be used if you have a usb mouse with a wheel.

Identifier  "Mouse1"     Driver      "mouse"     Option "Protocol"    "Auto"     Option "Device"      "/dev/ums0"     Option "ZAxisMapping"       "4 5"

You now have a working usb mouse on your FreeBSD workstation.  Congratulations!

Author: James Cornell
unixpenguin2004 at earthlink dot net