El Capitan and Microsoft Mouse (IntelliPoint) Not Working

I don’t have a MS keyboard. You might look to see if there is a “helper” command for the KB and just add another line to the mouse script with the same nohup syntax.

Randy

I checked and found my keyboard helper file in a similar location.  I made a 2nd line in the shell script for it with the file path:

nohup /Library/PreferencePanes/Microsoft\ Keyboard.prefPane/Contents/Resources/MicrosoftKeyboardHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/MicrosoftKeyboardHelper > /dev/null 2>&1 &

I renamed my script file from "mouse" to "DesktopSet" since it now includes keyboard and mouse, and made the corresponding changes in the crontab. 

I want to thank Randy for the clarifications. I hadn't quite realized that his shell script ended with the one (now two) nohup lines and that "crontab -e" was the Terminal command to edit the existing crontab, and ":wq!" the vi command to save the additions and re-enter the normal Terminal mode. I had originally thought the shell script included all the cron stuff as well. I am still not sure about the "exit" command below the 2 shell script lines but I believe it is extraneous if I use a text editor rather than vi to create the script. Hope I have all this right, now.

I still won't try this unless my current configuration becomes unstable again because it has been too much work getting the keyboard and mouse to behave.

Tried your solution, but sadly the mouse still doesn't show up in the "System preferences > Microsoft Mouse" panel.

First, it seems to me that you have created a folder "myloginid" in the /users directory and saved this script there under the name "mouse".

The “myloginid” was just meant to represent your own loginid. If you open Terminl and type “pwd” you should see that you are already in that directory. You can create the script right there using the “TextEdit” text editor in OSX or using the Unix “vi” editor. If you are not familiar with vi then best to use the TextEdit editor that is part of OSX.

Presumably since the file mouse is in a subdirectory of /users, it is in the collections of paths automatically searched by Mac OS X and enables it to be accessed during reboot?

The crontab is just a Unix thing that allows you to run a script at scheduled times. In this case, when the system boots. When the operating system boots and starts the cron daemon it looks for “crontabs” for each user on the system and begins scheduling the jobs therein at the times sprecified. You can see the cron process by executing the following using Terminal.

$ ps -ef|grep cron | grep -v grep

    0   290     1   0 Fri04PM ??   0:00.21 /usr/sbin/cron

Also, do you recommend making this new folder invisible?

No need to make it invisible.

Second, I can presumably use any text editor, especially TextWrangler or Bbedit, and copy and paste your typed script with the exception of being sure the 3 lines in red are all one line, and to confirm the path of MicrosoftMouseHelper. (My path is the same as yours.) Then save it to a file named "mouse" in /users/myloginid. 

Yes, That is correct.

To activate the script are the following Terminal commands required?

   sh mouse.sh

   chmod +x mouse.sh

If you want to manually execute the script make sure you have executed the “chmod” command as shown and then just enter the full path to the script. chmod is only executed once to make the script executable.

chmod  755  /Users/myloginid/mouse

/Users/myloginid/mouse

After this, it is time to reboot and the mouse should work fine without SIP? Of course, those of us with Microsoft Comfort keyboards may still need partially disabled SIP?

Assuming you created the crontab as stated earlier. You can verify by listing it as follows:

crontab -l

@reboot  /Users/myloginid/mouse

I don’t have a MS keyboard. You might look to see if there is a “helper” command for the KB and just add another line to the mouse script with the same nohup syntax.

Randy

Thanks, Randy. If my system becomes unstable again, I will probably try your technique. 

Randy, for people like me who are not programmers, let me repeat the steps as I understand them and maybe you can correct my errors because I doubt that I know how to do some of the things you have laid out.

First, it seems to me that you have created a folder "myloginid" in the /users directory and saved this script there under the name "mouse". Presumably since the file mouse is in a subdirectory of /users, it is in the collections of paths automatically searched by Mac OS X and enables it to be accessed during reboot? Also, do you recommend making this new folder invisible?

Second, I can presumably use any text editor, especially TextWrangler or Bbedit, and copy and paste your typed script with the exception of being sure the 3 lines in red are all one line, and to confirm the path of MicrosoftMouseHelper. (My path is the same as yours.) Then save it to a file named "mouse" in /users/myloginid. 

To activate the script are the following Terminal commands required?

   sh mouse.sh

   chmod +x mouse.sh

After this, it is time to reboot and the mouse should work fine without SIP? Of course, those of us with Microsoft Comfort keyboards may still need partially disabled SIP?

I also want to make another comment on my solutions, above. I was thinking that I did not need the InteliType and InteliPoint system preferences since I had programmed the extra keyboard keys and mouse buttons using Keyboard Maestro and the Mission Control preference panel, respectively. But... when I deleted InteliType and InteliPoint, everything went bonkers until I reinstalled them. Apparently the keyboard cannot send the keystroke to Keyboard Maestro unless InteliKey is active, and similarly the mouse buttons both stopped working as well.

**I created a shell script and crontab using "Terminal". The script is as follows.**Note that your Microsoft Mouse Helper file name may be named differently so ensure you find the correct one, should be same or similar.

Open terminal on your mac and create a script file like the following "mouse" script.

######################################

#  file name : /users/myloginid/mouse

######################################

#!/bin/ksh

# The following red text is one line in the script, the forum just wraps the text.

nohup /Library/PreferencePanes/

Microsoft\ Mouse.prefPane/Contents/Resources/MicrosoftMouseHelper.app/

Contents/MacOS/MicrosoftMouseHelper > /dev/null 2>&1 &

exit

# Set execute permissions on the file.

chmod 755 /users/myloginid/mouse

# Create a crontab with one line as shown. This gets executed when the system boots.

crontab -e

@reboot  /Users/myloginid/mouse

:wq!

# View the crontab

crontab -l

@reboot  /Users/myloginid/mouse

Reboot the Mac and see if your mouse is working right.

This has been working reliably for me without disabling SIP with csrutil.

Randy