[tlug] Mouse trouble

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

CL writes:

 > This morning, the torrenting machine, a 2-core AMD homebuilt which runs 
 > Xubuntu 12.04 (x64), refused to accept left clicks from my wireless 
 > mouse (which has its receiver attached to a PCI USB driver card).  I 
 > plugged a USB mouse into the system (which uses the USB bridge on the 
 > motherboard) and it behaved the same way.

I think it's unlikely to be a hardware problem, since two different
mice with two different I/O channels behave the same way.

I have had problems (though not as weird as yours) on upgrades to
udev, hald, and the evdev mouse driver.  The point of these programs
is zero-configuration plus hot-plugging, but my experience has been
that they themselves require configuration and that they occasionally
break on upgrade.  They're bitch to diagnose and fix.

 > I rebooted and can call up any program from the main launcher menu
 > using left click, select items and make changes using left click

You haven't done any upgrades or installed new software on that
machine recently?

The above makes it sound like your desktop or Window manager is
stealing the mouse clicks.

 > I have tried an Xubuntu 12.04 i386 and x64 live CDs and UBCD's Parted 
 > Magic (Slackware) desktop with the same results.

I don't understand this, and it would seem to be inconsistent with the
hypothesis that the WM is stealing the clicks since live CDs should
have a different kernel, userland, and WM or at least different
versions.