experimenting with LiveCDs, need help

Hi, I know this'll seem a little silly to post here, but it's really the only forum (I'm speaking of the whole, not just Morbius) that I've been using for a while (I just wouldn't wanna seem like a complete n00b to people on a different forum).

Anyway, I've downloaded a Linux distro ISO and burned it to a cd. It boots up fine, but the only issue is that I can't use the mouse! It's the "Cool Linux CD" distribution (don't know what it's based on) that uses IceWM for its GUI. I've already done some searching for Linux mouse drivers, but to no avail. Can anyone help me with this?

Do you use USB or PS/2 mouse, and what brand and model?

It's a PS/2 mouse, but the mouse brand name is too worn out to see clearly. All I can make out is "Micro" (it's not a Microsoft mouse, though). I've had the mouse for a while.

Hmm the system should be able to consider it as "Generic Mouse".

I'm not sure, but have you tried any other LiveCD or the LiveCD+Mouse at another machine?

liveCD with IceWM? hm, made a quick search on wikipedia, it must be a rather old one.

edit - found it. it's based on gentoo. from the features list,
- Kernel 2.4.20-wolk and 2.4.22 with supermount, squashfs, shfs patches and ALSA 0.9.6 drivers

man this is SO old, current kernel is 2.6.25.x, no wonder that certain things that should be automated by now aren't available on kernel 2.4.

try zenwalk live. i use zenwalk (the "real", not live cd) on a daily basis and it has proven to me as a reliable, rock solid and beautiful platform with the underlying simplicity of a slackware distribution. give it a try.

http://www.zenwalk.org/

i think zenwalk doesn't look nearly as zen as ubuntu does

he tried a distro that was gentoo-based and had icewm as win manager. so i thought he wanted something for older pcs that is fast (xfce instead of gnome), non-bloated (400mb iso, 1 app per task) and closer to unix (slackware instead of debian). plus, zenwalk just released version 5.2 yesterday, so it might be the most up to date distro right now.

yeah, of course, ubuntu is becoming bloated more and more.

Well, it works with Sun xVM VirtualBox, but the issue using the virtual machine is performance (you can only do so much with an emulated machine w/ 512MB RAM and 128MB video memory; my real machine has 1.5GB RAM with 512MB video memory (NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT)).

Ok guys, I think I found the problem. I did a little more searching, and apparently the mouse has to be USB to work. Oh well.

But it seems strange; it said it had "USB mouse and keyboard support", so why doesn't it have issues with my keyboard, too? It's also PS/2.

Well, I have an extra one (just because, ) that is USB, but it doesn't seem to work at all with the OS.

anyway, a more recent distribution could resolve a bunch of other problems as well.

I use live cds quite often. some you may want to look at are ubcd4win (ultimate boot disk for windows)which is also the only one I have been able to get to work from bootable usb memorystick without issues. also there is Knoppix. searching the net for anything related to bartpve will help too (bartpve is used to build live cds might work with other distros of your choosing)