Antique, 9 pin, serial trackball - thru' Plugable USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter

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"I have an old trackball, purchased in the late '80s/early '90s when I upgraded to a a 486. It (the trackball) was quite expensive at the time (about £18.00 - or maybe even £30.00 - if I remember aright). It was unbranded and ran on a fairly basic DOS driver BUT it was the BEST, easiest & most reliable pointing device I ever used - and I used it for about 12 years or more (DOS, Desqview, OS/2 & Linux) until serial became old hat.

Now I use a laptop running Linux. I have read good reviews about the Plugable USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter (Prolific PL2303HX Chipset). I have bought one, plugged it into my Linux (i5) Laptop and attached the old Trackball. The system recognizes it - the Bus 002 Device 006: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port - BUT it doesn't recognize any signal from the Trackball.

Now, I realise that, by today's standards my old trackball is 'spadelike' in its simplicity - it may be broken, but like a spade, there's not much to break.

I am out of my depth. I would dearly love my old Trackball back. Does anyone have any ideas?"

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My guess is the adapter and the mouse are both working fine, the problem is your OS doesn't know that what you just attached there is a mouse. The device is probably popping up at /dev/ttyUSB0 (typical for USB/serial adapters), which means you just need to tell your OS to use that device as the mouse. I'm not sure how to do that, but I imagine it should be easy enough to figure out. When you get it working, you may consider putting in a udev rule for it to make sure that hot-plug name changes don't mess you up.

This may help:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SerialMouseHowto

What distro are you using?

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Last edited by suicidaleggroll; Yesterday at 23:36.

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Type the following exactly:

1. sudo nano -B /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2. If you have one, you will be asked for your user password.
3. The editor will open, displaying the xorg.conf file.
4. Navigate (using the arrow and/or Page Up/Down keys) to the following section: (all lines may not be present)
   
   Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier "Configured Mouse"
   Driver "mouse"
   Option "CorePointer"
   Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
   Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
   Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
   Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
   EndSection
5. Change the "Option Device" and "Option Protocol" lines as follows:
   
   Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier "Configured Mouse"
   Driver "mouse"
   Option "CorePointer"
   Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
   Option "Protocol" "auto"
   Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
   EndSection

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05-glamor.conf 11-evdev.conf 50-screen.conf 50-wacom.conf
10-evdev.conf 50-device.conf 50-synaptics.conf 90-keytable.conf
10-libvnc.conf 50-monitor.conf 50-vmmouse.conf

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