So my USB wheel mouse is now working. I don't exactly know why. I had configured USB support into the kernel, and yesterday I copied some mouse config from this guy's XF86Config-4 file in the hope that it was all I needed. Nope. Luckily my touchpad still worked, but I kept reaching for the mouse before remembering that it wasn't responding.
Today Jeff helped me determine that we hadn't enabled all the proper USB and human-interface modules after all, so I compiled another kernel (I've lost track at this point of how many I've done since Wednesday) and rebooted. Jeff and I started poking around to see what modules got loaded, and then I reached for the mouse accidentally—
And the pointer moved. We hadn't even tried the mouse to see if it worked.
Senji says:
I always put a sequence number in my make-kpkg invocations, and the name of the computer for which the kernel is available.
This makes backtracking to earlier versions that seemed to work better easier, and as a side effect you get an idea of how many times you've compiled it.
For example the command I used to compile cleopatra's current kernel was:
really make-kpkg --revision custom-cleopatra-2004-04-10+run1 kernel_image
(really is like su; you appear to be using fakeroot there, which is probably more sensible!)
Laurabelle says:
That's approximately what the --append-to-version option is for, though I haven't quite figured out the difference between that and --revision. Mine's simpler (just the date of compilation), but it has the same effect.
I also keep backup config files from each compilation!