No mouse in X after installing multilib?

Perhaps you run the 64-bit Slackware 13.0. If so, did you by any chance install my 32bit multilib packages on top, and then ran the slackpkg command after that?

There was a bug in my multilib conversion script convertpkg-compat32 (all versions before “10alien“). The compat32-tools package which I have uploaded today contains a fixed version (11alien).

If you have run slackpkg after installing my set of multilib packages and then instructed slackpkg to install the *.new files that it finds, you would end up with empty /etc/rc.d/rc.hald , /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus and /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld scripts thanks to this bug.

These empty startup scripts cause hal and dbus not to start when the computer boots (and neither does mysql, but that is not relevant to this little mouse tale). This will perhaps not have an immediately obvious effect, but if you start X, you will have no mouse and no keyboard because X.Org uses hal to probe for and configure your hardware peripherals.

The fix is to upgrade to my latest compat32-tools package, and then reinstall the original Slackware64 hal, dbus and mysqld packages:

upgradepkg --reinstall a/dbus-1.2.14-x86_64-1.txz
upgradepkg --reinstall l/hal-0.5.11-x86_64-6.txz
upgradepkg --reinstall ap/mysql-5.0.84-x86_64-1.txz

Make sure you install the *.new files  which you will find in /etc/rc.d/ , thereby overwriting the empty files !!!

Apologies for the inconvenience this may have caused. Apart from a new compat32-tools package I have also uploaded clean, re-created *-compat32 packages (created by the massconvert32.sh script, using the original 32-bit Slackware packages).

Eric