TITLE: Installation of GPM on LFS. LFS VERSION: Any AUTHOR: Marc Heerdink SYNOPSIS: Installation of gpm can be pretty difficult. This hint makes it a bit easier. HINT: version 1.3 (12/26/2001) The installation of GPM (General Purpose Mouse support) can be pretty hard when you use mawk. This hint is a guideline to install GPM in a few minutes. First, you'll have to get the sources for GPM if you don't already have them: ftp://arcana.linux.it/pub/gpm/gpm-1.19.6.tar.gz This location has been down for ages, though, so you may want to try this link: ftp://ftp.schottelius.org/pub/linux/gpm/gpm-1.19.6.tar.bz2 Extract this file in /usr/src: cd /usr/src && tar xzvf /path/to/gpm-1.19.6.tar.gz If the whole GPM installation would be this easy, there would be no need for a hint I suppose :) but we're approaching the more difficult part now... First, make sure you're in the /usr/src/gpm-1.19.6 directory. Then, we'll have to configure the beast: ./configure --prefix=/usr Configuration should give no problems. The compile stage is next, but this is the part where GPM goes wonky. Open /usr/src/gpm-1.19.6/Makefile and search for "SUBDIRS". Remove "doc" from the subdirs so this line looks like: SUBDIRS = contrib Now open src/gpm.c and type #include on the first line. Now it's time to make GPM. Make sure you're in the /usr/src/gpm-1.19.6 directory and type: make This time, compilation should give you no trouble. Install GPM by typing: make install Because we removed the directory "doc" from the targets, the documentation wasn't installed. Mawk can't build the documentation, so you've got two choices left: * Install gawk and rebuild gpm with the manpages * Get the manpages from: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~gimli/gpm-manpages-1.19.6.tar.bz2 (These manpages were mailed to me by Manfred H. Winter , but there have been more people who submitted them to me. I just didn't have the time to make them available yet... :) The only thing left to do is to install the info pages (they come pre-built with GPM): cd doc && install-info --dir-file=/usr/info/dir --info-file=gpm.info You did it! You have installed GPM! Read the documentation (info gpm or man gpm) to find out how you can load the driver. Generally this will be something like: gpm -t ps2 -m /dev/psaux for PS/2 mice, and gpm -t ms -m /dev/ttyS0 for Serial mice. If these don't work, consult the info page. Thanks to Spider for reporting that a mirror site for the GPM ftp has been added to fmII, thanks to Manfred H. Winter and Andy Goth for mailing me the manpages and thanks to Kevin Worthington for mailing me this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OK, here goes, not really a huge deal, but I think it'd be helpful to the doc: to the end of /etc/init.d/rc add: # #Starting gpm device # echo -n "Starting Console Mouse Device " and follow by the last command you instructed, either: gpm -t ps2 -m /dev/psaux OR gpm -t ms -m /dev/ttyS0 #End of gpm initialization Let me know what you think. I know it's not the most elegant, but it gets things going. Please advice. Thanks Kevin Worthington ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I must admit that I didn't really look at it (no offence :) but it might be useful to some readers. Pfff that was some hard work. I hope I won't have to update this anymore for the next 12 months or so :p __END__