[Gllug] Mouse: was Controversial Joel Spolsky article

[Christopher Currie]

Thanks for the ideas...

On Sunday 21 December 2003 09:52, Nix wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Christopher Currie said:
> > But the bad news is that since about October the SuSe Linux has
> > developed a randomly freezing mouse cursor;

> Is it only the mouse cursor which stalls? 

Seems to be... but attempts to get round that can cause the system to crash.
When it happens in KDE, I can usually get round it by typing Alt-F1 to bring 
up a menu, then use arrow keys to select 'start new session', log in to new 
session, log out of that and select 'restart', which takes me back to the 
original with the cursor freed. But 1 time in 4 that doesn't work and I can't 
start a new session -- the alt-F1 and arrow keys work but the system doesn't 
respond to the return key..

>If the rest of the system
> ticks on OK then you're in luck: simple diagnostics is much easier.
>
> > [The mouse is a Microsoft Intellimouse with 2 buttons & hamster wheel,
> > and
>
> I don't know this device. Does it have a PS/2 or serial interface?

PS/2.

>
> Luckily it's easy to tell if it's a hardware problem or not :)
>
> If it is just the mouse which stalls, have a look at /proc/interrupts
> when the mouse stalls, waggle it, have a look again, and see if the
> interrupt count for the appropriate device (psaux or serial) climbs when
> you waggled. If it does, then your hardware is fine and it's a software
> problem. If it doesn't climb, then it's a hardware problem: the
> interrupts aren't reaching the machine.

Had a look at /proc/interrupts, but couldn't do the test for a simple reason: 
the mouse cursor has to be over the area on the screen where the terminal 
window comes up (top left) for the system to accept keying into the terminal 
session. When the mouse last froze, it wasn't over the area. (This may itself 
give a clue to the fault).

And of course planning the test made the mouse work unfrozen for 4 hours, 
while normally it freezes within 30 mins. of starting a session.

I have been trying a way round by running 'unclutter' as a process from the 
command line at the beginning of the KDE session. Didn't use that in 
tonight's test session ... but so far in other sessions when 'unclutter' is 
run, the cursor has not frozen. Have not had a long enough session with it to 
be sure that it its a reliable workaround, though.

I have a suspicion, but no hard evidence, that the problem may be something to 
do with the firewall.

>
> (What the problem might actually be, I have no idea as yet, and if it
> turns out to be a hardware problem I'll leave it to the hardware gurus
> on the list. ;) )

Anyway, thanks for the help. I'll also try testing it again with another 
desktop manager (have twm and mwm) to see if the terminal-window-position
problem doesn't prevent the test.

Christopher

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