It should be possible, we are using X after all, but the cursor is usually hidden on the 770. It does exist, I often see the 'timer' cursor when opera is loading.
It does not matter if a hardware cursor is available, X.org fully supports software cursors.
My suspicion is that the default cursors have simply been made completely transparent. Check out /usr/share/icons/xcursor-transparent.

One thing to remember is that the UI was specifically designed as a touch-screen interface. A mouse would be useless in most respects...

I'm not sure I agree. Just surfing with a scroll-wheel - especially one that could be locked to scroll the screen by pushing down the scroll-wheel - would be great.

It wouldn't be a huge deal to get a mouse working on the 770, but I'm sure it would be nice. Reaching for the pen and tapping on the screen all the time works but it's not as comfortable as a mouse would be.

Regular X cursor themes works on the 770. I did some experiments with this some weeks ago. I downloaded jimmacs cursors from here , and I put them in the right directory on the 770 (/usr/share/user-icons), and modified the default/index.theme file to load jimmacs cursors instead (it's the cursors that come as standard on an ubuntu install). It worked great (a reboot is necessary to get it working in all apps). The loading-cursor (as seen in opera), is even animated.

It wasn't too useful so I changed back to the transparent cursors, but with a BT mouse though it would be quite nice.

Well, one can hope that some stalwart 770 hacker will suddenly find him/herself with an unstoppable craving for a mouse on the 770 and help the rest of us out too.

I did a fair amount of work on this for IT2005 and as mentioned, it was actually a deficiency in the X server. Everything seems configured for simultaneous stylus and mouse use (even in IT2006), but at least for IT2005 it didn't work at all. The X server only paid attention to input from the first input device specified -the stylus-, and specifying something else did nothing or made it crash. I narrowly escaped having to reflash a couple times because it would reboot automatically with a flawed configuration over and over again. I'll check it out when I have a moment and see if the X server will work this time around.

Larry

Wow, seems like this issue of getting a bluetooth mouse working is proving to be more trouble than it's worth. I would guess there would also need to be some code to switch between using the mouse back to using the touch screen without having to restart.

Try this: When it's implemented for IT2006, fire up the VNC server and use VNC on a desktop device to communicate with the 770. For certain tasks, like configuring the device or taking notes, a full size keyboard and a mouse is nice. You get a feel for it when you are using VNC.

I find that using my BT keyboard makes me want a mouse rather than a stylus.

-F

Yeah, I remember using VNC server and using the mouse to control the cursor. Let's hope we get VNC for 2006 OS soon to see if eveything works like before. I think that once we know that works it will just be a matter of some dedicated minds building a simple app to get direct input from mouse/keyboard working.

Well, if anyone ever does it it will be someone who is comfortable hacking Linux. I'm not sure I believe it is impossible to do on the 770 hardware, but I would believe it may require too much work or too big modifications to be practical. There are times though, as has been mentioned above, when having a mouse would be exceedingly nice.