Welcome to the forums hextrain!
Although it is possible to command your machine using nothing but the keyboard, I must confess that the invention of the rodent has it's place in modern day computing
Ehm... I have to work from memory and make a lot of guesses. Dell... they use Synaptics touchpads do they not?
Anyway, what do you mean with "it either does nothing or goes apeshit" 'cuz you know, it gives different kinds of AS. You for example have big AS, small AS, blue AS, thrown AS, invisible AS, AS nauseum
Can you describe it's behavior? Did the mouse work when you where running from the LifeCD (in other words, did this behavior start /after/ the install?)
Also, I take it becaue you said touchpad, that we are talking about a laptop here? What happens if you plug in an external mouse (if available)
And we need this:
Open up a terminal. If you don't know how without a mouse, well I don't know either. Not in Gnome anyway. Alt+F2 - "terminal" comes to mind. Otherwise this helps:
Press (at the same time)
You are now taken to a textual login screen. Log in.
Enter this command:
Code:
cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | less
Look for the section that concerns your mouse.
It should look something like this:
Quote:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
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Can you post that here?
Switch back to the GUI by pressing (at the same time)