Why does my mouse not work with X?

Why does my mouse not work with X?

If you are using syscons (the default console driver), you can configure FreeBSD to support a mouse pointer on each virtual screen. In order to avoid conflicting with X, syscons supports a virtual device called /dev/sysmouse. All mouse events received from the real mouse device are written to the sysmouse device via moused. If you wish to use your mouse on one or more virtual consoles, and use X, see Q: 4.13. and set up moused.

Then edit /etc/XF86Config and make sure you have the following lines.

    Section         Pointer
    Protocol        "SysMouse"
    Device          "/dev/sysmouse"
    .....

The above example is for XFree86 3.3.2 or later. For earlier versions, the Protocol should be MouseSystems.

Some people prefer to use /dev/mouse under X. To make this work, /dev/mouse should be linked to /dev/sysmouse (see sysmouse(4)):

    # cd /dev
    # rm -f mouse
    # ln -s sysmouse mouse


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