optical mouse LED turns off during boot

[tedc]

About 3 months ago I installed FC3. Over the past month my old MicroSoft ps2
scroll wheel mouse has been acting flaky, so I decided to try an optical mouse.
The optical mouse (ostensibly "GE" but really jasco) works fine with Win2K on
this dual-boot PC. However, in the middle of booting to Linux the LED turns off,
and that's the end of the game. Buttons seem to work, or at least they tweak
any widget in the R upper corner of the desktop, but there's no visible cursor
and moving the mouse has no visible effect.

system-config-mouse offers a limited list of selections, none of which appears to
be an optical mouse.

I have the suspicion that, if the optical mouse had been connected at the time I
installed FC3, it would have been detected and properly configured. But how can
I get it to work now?

Here's the relevant section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf which works fine with the old
mouse but not with the new one--

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

[bytesniper]

i did a search for you on google and afraid i dont have real good news for you. the first few articles i read (post from a mailing list, actually) all said they messed with it for a while but eventually took it back and got a different brand (some MS some Logitech) whcih worked fine. read one that said that they got it working using the ExplorerPS/2 protocol but could only scroll down with the mouse wheel. wierd. i have a 5 button MS Explorer 4 optical (keyboards and mice is something that MS actually does well :) ). This is how i have mine setup. your mileage may vary.

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

[tedc]

I gave up and bought a USB/PS/2 2 button + scroll wheel mouse at a local
geek shop. Label on it says "Microsoft" but its packaging was "informal"
to say the least. I figured even if it was a noname counterfeit, so what,
it's probably made on the same factory in China as the real thing.

Worked without further tinkering, using the xorg.conf I started with.