Using mouse for typing
Jul. 4th, 2012 06:11 pmI was just using a mouse to type cmdline commands. No, I did not use on screen keyboard. There was no on screen keyboard because the screen was 80x48.
It worked like this: I have booted OS (this took about 1 second), then typed "ifconfig".
Nothing had appeared on the screen. Then I scrolled mouse wheel, and the letters I typed on the keyboard were slowly appearing in the command prompt one by one. Eventually CR was reached and command ran successfully. To make the experience even more funny, that was happening in front of customers.
Looks like any mouse wheel movement triggered an interrupt, which in turn triggered keyboard buffer read. When keyboard and mouse cables were swapped, the mouse wheel hack stopped working... The condition survived reboot. The system was still almost usable. Eventually keyboard started working normally after EHCI was enabled in the OS.
It worked like this: I have booted OS (this took about 1 second), then typed "ifconfig".
Nothing had appeared on the screen. Then I scrolled mouse wheel, and the letters I typed on the keyboard were slowly appearing in the command prompt one by one. Eventually CR was reached and command ran successfully. To make the experience even more funny, that was happening in front of customers.
Looks like any mouse wheel movement triggered an interrupt, which in turn triggered keyboard buffer read. When keyboard and mouse cables were swapped, the mouse wheel hack stopped working... The condition survived reboot. The system was still almost usable. Eventually keyboard started working normally after EHCI was enabled in the OS.