Comment 72 for bug 9068

Going on five years on this serial mouse bug, apparently little progress... today I was testing a PCChips M748LMRT mainboard, with AT keyboard, serial mouse, no PS/2 or USB. 384MB. Puppy Linux booted fine, with simple manual choice of serial mouse. The latest Ubuntu 9.04 was useless. Booted into destop GUI, mouse cursor, but no mouse response. No useful boot parameter help from LiveCD. Googling for Ubuntu serial mouse boot parameters also no help, just repeated obscure references to "mouse/device=/dev/ttyS1". No mention of the fact that this geekness actually refers to the second COM port, not the first. How can something so basic and simple be so complicated? Tried Knoppix 5.1.1 CD. Auto detected and configured the standard Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A just fine. Delving into the dmesg there revealed the proper /dev/ttyS0 reference. Of course, by then, I didn't need to know, since 2007 Knoppix Just Worked. Ubuntu is mostly great, but if Puppy starts converting to Ubuntu base and loses the special advantages, it will be a big loss for the linux LiveCD ecosystem. The more I experiment, the more I get the feeling Ubuntu does not really believe in LiveCD mode, just views it as a demo toy. For years, most of my Linux experience has been from LiveCD, from scratch, over and over. If it doesn't work well enough, I move on to another distro. Puppy is the only distro I have ever found that always properly supports my new 1360x768 Toshiba LCD TV -- another victory for simple manual selection. Ubuntu auto-supports the TV less than half the time, randomly -- mostly I get a mysterious no-video mode; and after months of struggle I have not yet found any secret cheatcode to make it always work. One gets tired of trying to use something that may need to be rebooted ten times before it starts properly. It would be a vast improvement if Ubuntu LiveCD offered an alternative Puppy-like simple manual start mode, just asking about mouse, keyboard, and video modes.