My parents had gotten me a wireless presentation clicker for my birthday. It's really neat -- it's the size of a PCMCIA card -- and it has various buttons, and has a built in laser pointer. It's actually designed to fit inside a PCMCIA slot in your laptop so you don't forget your clicker :-)

It's harder to setup than one might expect, however. It's USB. I popped the dongle into the USB slot, and the light didn't come up. Nuts. Running Gentoo, I immediatly suspected the options I had compiled my kernel with. I went through, enabled a few more options, and recompiled. Nothing.

I tried it on Shana's Gentoo laptop, same problem. Huh.

I took it to work, maybe I'd have some better luck there. I stuck it into my desktop, and it lit right up. Well, at least it works. So, all I should have to do is copy that kernel config to my home box. After doing that, and recompiling -- nothing. Ugh!

I began looking around Google, but I saw very few mentions of this sort of thing in Linux. Thoughts of hardware incompatability began to cross my mind.

One last ditch effort -- I fired up an old laptop whose hard drive had died, simply to see if it might work. Unlike the laptop I had tried -- this USB slots in it were configured horizontally, not vertically. I had to think for a moment, which direction would the dongle fit. Wait a moment... if the dongle fits either way...

Bah! I was putting it in upside down. Correcting that, it works perfectly. The buttons all work, distance is good, and the laser pointer is a nice touch. No more filling up both hands with gadgets to give a presentation.

I have a presentation coming up in early may, on building a wireless router with Gentoo. Josiah and I had discussed some titles for a similar talk he had done. Since he passed it up, I'm going to go with "Pass Gentoo the Pipe". It just seems so, appropriate :-)

You know, that's what I thought too :-) I believe I have other devices which I could only put in one way. So it really threw me when I reached the point where I realized I could fit either way.

I think what it might come down to is that the device being plugged in can be keyed... but it's up to the manufacturer to do so.

In this case, the dongle is very small and flat. Remember how the presentation clicker fits inside the PCMCIA slot for easy carrying? The dongle fits inside the clicker in this case -- so it needs a lot profile. I wonder if adding the "keying" to make it only fit one way would have prevented that portability they were going for (which I really do enjoy now that I've got the rest of this figured out :-)

It was a Hobbes Wireless Presentation clicker. I had purchased it at ThinkGeek.com, but I no longer see it on there. It was cool as it was small enough to fit inside your laptop's PCMCIA slot. There's bound to be others like it.

It just needed typical USB drivers. I believe it looks like a USB keyboard, as far as Linux is concerned. So it doesn't require anything fancy to work.

I think a lot of them work just like that. A good way to determine that ahead of time is to see if they advertise the clicker working in Windows 98 without any drivers, which this one did. If it can work in Win98 with no additional drivers, it's bound to work in Linux :-)