Carl, Thank you for the answer. I see two important differences between our cases: first, I think it's not just invisible (hovering as you say) cursor but completely irresponsive (no clicks accepted, nothing...). I tried moving, right clicking, double clicking etc, no success. Second, I swapped mice between two identical machines - the other one dies too, while the first one works fine on another machine...What can one conclude? Again, I'll take the advice and replace this mouse with the third (and totally different) one. At last, it's possible that these two identical mice are also "identically broken"... Thanks again for your advice, Best regards cikasole On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 10:40 -0500, Carl Hartung wrote:
Radule Soskic wrote:
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What happens is that my mouse cursor disappears sometimes, and the system stops responding to any mouse events. It happens rather rarely and on random, so I can not reproduce this, nor to guess about possible causes. Other than this, system works stably and reliably, with long uptimes.
When I restart X, all goes fine again. Mouse cursor shows up and everything works as normal. But, I use my suse as a desktop/office machine and it is very annoying when you have to close and restart everything in the middle of your work...
Is this seen by other members of the list? Are there possible explanations or solutions, maybe?
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Hi Radule,
Funny you should post this... I just experienced the same problem for a *second* time. Before you go crazy chasing down and trying different modules/drivers/settings, etc., I highly recommend you just install a new or borrowed (known working) mouse.
Background: The first time I experienced this problem was last year -- immediately after one of those "supplementary" KDE upgrades. I tried to resolve it unsuccessfully for a weekend and, eventually, just formatted and reinstalled. I ran a 'stock' system plus YOU updates until a few months later, when the mouse just suddenly "died." It couldn't be seen by either SuSE or my fall-back Win98SE. I even replaced the cable using a cannibalized one from a known good mouse. No joy... obviously a sensor or some supporting circuitry had failed. The problem was solved by purchasing a new mouse.
The relevant point: I treated the first incident as a KDE/Linux issue and the second as a simple hardware failure. I didn't connect the dots because there were too few of them.
Yesterday, I backed up my perfectly stable but highly customized SuSE 9.0 installation and installed 9.2. Within an hour of starting to test drive the new version, my mouse cursor started 'ducking under' (still there but invisible) and activating whatever link it happened to find itself hovering over. When it decided to reappear, it was someplace unexpected and random on the screen. It ignored about half of my attempts to guide it when it did decide to become visible. And yes, the behavior was random and intermittent.
I *almost* started looking at drivers/modules/settings again, but instead -- based on hindsight -- I opened the mouse and replaced the cable. It worked like a charm. I'd bet money now that a failing cable is what actually killed the circuitry in my previous mouse.
Of course, YMMV, but maybe this might be useful.
Good luck!
- Carl
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