> I'm beginning to get pain in my shoulder through over use of the mouse.
> I have seen other alternatives like a mouse pen or a track ball mouse
> and wonder if anyone has experience of these things and recommend their
> use.
>
> It would have to work under Fedora 10 or Ubuntu of course :-)
I started suffering from RSI about 4 years or so ago now and managed to
get a referral to a physiotherapist (fortunately I had private health
insurance so didn't have to wait 9months). She was very helpful and
provided me with tendon stretching exercises etc. which where a great long
term help as well as loosening my shoulder muscles up which provided more
immediate relief.
I now use a simple Logitech MX400 which provides slightly better
ergonomics than the normal cheap "flat" mice, but it isn't the thing that
really helped. The physio' worked out that my particular problem was due
to stretching too far out to the right to reach around the keyboard to
grab the mouse, and from bad posture (partly due to a bad chair).
Having fixed the layout of my work station, got the nicer Logitech mouse,
and a narrower "split" ergonomic keyboard most of the problems no longer
occur.
If you have already been to the doctors then my apologies got assuming you
hadn't yet. But if not it really is worth getting it looked into properly
as sometimes it isn't what you might think is the real cause of the
problem. In my case switching to an ergonomic mouse / tracker ball but not
changing the keyboard would have been no help as the stretching would
still have been happening and causing me problems.
Having said all that, things like tracker balls etc. have all just worked
for me out of the box. As others have said they are "just" mice and linux
seems just fine with those nowadays.
