mouse pointer freezes

[mimosa]

As mentioned tangentially in another post ... I think this also happened in my non-live install, and now it is affecting my shiny new from-live install. The mouse freezes at unpredictable moments, but the keyboard is not affected. The only way out I have found is to reboot.

For instance just now, I was running OpenOffice Calc and Firefox with several tabs open in Firefox. I clicked in the search box to overwrite the text, and it froze. I was still able to use Firefox after a fashion with Tab.

So it seems to happen when clicking to do something rather than just out of the blue. It's difficult to quantify, but certainly rather more often than I would expect, more than daily; with Ubuntu, for instance, I'd say it was more than weekly that I get something that could be broadly characterised as a crash, and that feels like too often.

Are other people coming across this?

[damNageHack]

For me, it sounds like an hardware problem.

Do you have an USB mouse or PS/2?
Did you check cable and plug for failures?
Tried some other mice instead on the same slot?
Maybe try to use another slot if you are using USB. Possibly, your controller is broken.
Please give the output of

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lsusb

Try

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cat /dev/input/mice

while moving the mouse. You should see some garbage characters appearing on the screen.
Also, try to click as often as you can until freeze/crash happens. Then you will know if one of your mouse buttons is nearly dead.

[Shador]

I think I have exactly the same issues, but only very rarely and as I had no hint how to fix it and it wasn't too annoying, I didn't bother much. But I guess it might be related to Intel graphics (+ laptops/touchpads).
For me a X restart is enough, so you could try that too (AltGr + Print/Sys-Rq + k).

[mimosa]

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root[tim]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501USB Wireless Adapter
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1130:1620 Tenx Technology, Inc. 
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
root[tim]# 

It's a PS2 optical mouse, and it does seem to stick a lot more often with Salix. I'm not sure how to check the cable and the plug. I'll try swapping mice, but it'll take a while to get a good impression of the difference.

I'm not sure exactly how this works because I can't do it consistently, but sometimes clicking ctrl-alt-del followed by ctrl-alt-backspace takes me to a black screen with a rather clunky box asking me for username and password that takes me back to xfce and the frozen mouse; and there is a message (at the top of the screen, not in the box) saying the mouse or mouse pointer is "already grabbed". Does that suggest anything about whether it is a hardware or software problem?

@Shador

I was getting that slightly wrong - Alt instead of AltGr - and coming back to the frozen mouse. If using AltGr unsticks the mouse, it'll be much easier to live with. It's still a glitch, though.

I wonder if it could be something to do with RAM - only 1 GB on this machine, so I suppose two or three apps and five or six open tabs could put a strain on the OS that wouldn't happen if there were 2GB, couldn't it? I have a lot of swap, though. I'll test it by opening a ridiculous number of things and clicking a lot!

[damNageHack]

You should see raw input from ps/2 mouse with

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cat /dev/psaux

Try to move and click the mouse much often if it results in a freeze/crash. If no crash happens, it is propably some software problem.

[mimosa]

Yes -

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cat /dev/input/mice 

worked too. Clicking a lot randomly has had no untoward effects so far!