Mouse & touchpad weirdness

[gavmusic]

Greetings all. Long-time Debian Linux user but BSD newbie.

First of all, I have to say that installing PC-BSD is probably the easiest installation of any OS that I have done. Very nice.

Everything is working well apart from my laptop touchpad, which doesn't work at all & also using a mouse via the PS/2 port works for about 5 minutes & then that stops too. Sometimes it would work again if I unplugged & then reconnected the mouse, but mostly it wouldn't.

I'm not sure if my touchpad is a Synaptics device or not (how do I find out, please?) & I feel hesitant to implement the changes to X configuration mentioned elsewhere on this forum. I downloaded (portinstall) the Synaptics & Ksynaptics drivers as per the instruction & was then treated to 3 solid hours of what looked like compilation of an assortment of programmes - quite scary, even for a Linux user!!

I have solved my mouse problems for now by using a USB Logitech MarbleMouse & that seems to be working fine. However, I would still like to get my touchpad working.

Any help appreciated. I really like the look & feel of PC-BSD.

TIA,

Gavin.