This chapter contains mainly hardware utilities. It also contains some applications used by other applications in the book for installation purposes.
The GPM (General Purpose Mouse daemon) package contains a mouse server for the console and xterm. It not only provides cut and paste support generally, but its library component is used by various software such as Links to provide mouse support to the application. It is useful on desktops, especially if following (Beyond) Linux From Scratch instructions; it's often much easier (and less error prone) to cut and paste between two console windows than to type everything by hand!
Download (FTP): ftp://arcana.linux.it/pub/gpm/gpm-1.20.1.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: 2c63e827d755527950d9d13fe3d87692
Download size: 556 KB
Estimated disk space required: 6.7 MB
Estimated build time: 0.09 SBU
Recommended Patch: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/downloads/6.0/gpm-1.20.1-segfault-1.patch
Recommended Patch: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/downloads/6.0/gpm-1.20.1-silent-1.patch
Install GPM by running the following commands:
patch -Np1 -i ../gpm-1.20.1-segfault-1.patch &&
patch -Np1 -i ../gpm-1.20.1-silent-1.patch &&
LDFLAGS="-lm" ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc &&
make
Now, as the root user:
make install &&
cp conf/gpm-root.conf /etc &&
ldconfig
LDFLAGS="-lm": The math library must be linked with gpm, as ceil() is used in some cursor scrolling logic.
Install the /etc/rc.d/init.d/gpm init script included in the blfs-bootscripts-6.0 package.
make install-gpm
/etc/gpm-root.conf and ~/.gpm-root: The default and individual user gpm-root configuration files.
/etc/sysconfig/mouse: This file contains the name of your mouse device and the protocol which it uses. To create this file, run the following as the root user:
cat > /etc/sysconfig/mouse << "EOF" # Begin /etc/sysconfig/mouse MDEVICE="[yourdevice]" PROTOCOL="[yourprotocol]" GPMOPTS="[additional options]" # End /etc/sysconfig/mouse EOF
Examples of values to set MDEVICE, PROTOCOL, and GPMOPTS to are:
MDEVICE="/dev/psaux" PROTOCOL="imps2" GPMOPTS=""
A list of which protocol values are known can be found by running gpm -t -help. The MDEVICE setting depends on which type of mouse you have. For example, /dev/ttyS0 for a serial mouse (on Windows this is COM1), /dev/input/mice is often used for USB mice and /dev/psaux for PS2 mice. GPMOPTS is the 'catch all' for any additional options that are needed for your hardware.
is a security mechanism used to disable the paste buffer.
is a cut and paste utility and mouse server for virtual consoles.
is a default handler for gpm. It is used to draw menus on the root window.
is a simple sample application using the high-level library, meant to be read by programmers trying to use the high-level library.
is a program to report mouse events.
is a tool for determining the mouse type and device it's attached to.