Lost X selection mechanism on new opensuse12.2 install.

Going from 11.3 to 12.2 on older p4 machines. I just wondered if the so-called “primary” X selection mechanism is deprecated or flawed. I read X11r7.7 release notes, installed and ran “autocutsel” program (worked a little better). But the old two button PS2 mouse (middle emulator) paste doesn’t trigger anything on older tools like xterm. Using an old ATI r128 driver on a great screen. Perhaps the xorg.conf file is wrong, noticed no Sax3 for opensuse12.2 . Went through the /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Again just looking for ideas. Worried they’re leaving old timers behind. Thanks for all.

scroll button click does work on my openSUSE 12.2 / GNOME 3.4.2 and it does paste content in xterm application
But i like ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v supported by gnome-terminal.

Using a USB mouse, the scroll wheel acts as a middle button for pasting in xterm. That also happens with the PS scroll-wheel mouse that I use at work.

Simultaneous left/right click (middle button emulation) does not work with my current USB mouse. I don’t recall trying that at my work computer with a PS/2 mouse, but I’ll test that next time I am there (if I remember).

Middle button emulation works fine with the touchpad on my laptop, though I usually plug in a USB mouse and disable the touchpad.

On 02/06/2013 02:06 AM, EngJr wrote:
> Going from 11.3 to 12.2 on older p4 machines.

could easily be that the trouble you are encountering is the result of
the method used to accomplish the move from 11.3 to 12.2

there are three recommended/supported ways to make that move, most of
them work for a lot of folks…but, there are so many thousands of
permutations of what might go wrong that one has to be VERY lucky to get
to the new version with everything working…

here they are, none suggest a trouble free move is guranteed:
http://tinyurl.com/35p966c
http://tinyurl.com/93uemsr
http://tinyurl.com/7l4m2td

if you didn’t follow one of those ways, step-by-step, in order, no
skipping of steps and no creative diversions . . . well . . . then the
probability of all things working as expected goes down…and the surity
of a smile is (imho) pretty low to begin with…

personally, i not sure where to begin to look for the solution to the
symptom now faced…but, as you can see by comparing the old to new, the
guts of the newer /etc/X11* is vastly different…so, MAYBE if you have
a copy of the well working in 11.3 /etc/X11/xorg.conf you might be able
to lift settings from there and stuff them into
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/11-mouse.conf and find a smile…but, please read
my sig caveat prior to experimenting!


dd
http://tinyurl.com/DD-Caveat

Sincere thanks to all for assuring me it was my fault, not the computer. This was a clean install, not upgrade, intended to learn.

As long as I know it can work, I’ll try some of the fine suggestions and more. I’ll have to read all those X driver and mouse options, and perhaps use the distro’s xorg.conf.install instead of my cooked up xorg.conf (partly from a suse 10.1 sax2). I’ve never had problems with old NVidia TNT2 or Matrox cards except this X messes up by deciding on bad console framebuffers. A plug and play X is great, but sometimes playing with options is fun.

I just like programming with old NEdit, and slapping a long filename on xterm for compiling. Reaching for the copy/paste button every stroke is a chore. Glad old ways still live. The repository is incredible on 12.2.

After masking my xorg.conf file and using a USB optical scroll mouse, works great. The old PS2 ball mouse was recognized as a logitech, and was reclaimed compaq surplus at least 10 years ago. Maybe it will ignore my old IBM PS2 clickety click keyboards someday. Everything is feather touch today.

I prefer ball mouse to optical but we don’t get them these days.

Any tips on how I can get my Kensington Expert Mouse to do mouse button three emulation to restore the traditional X paste function under 12.2+KDE4.8.4 to the way it used to work on earlier OpenSUSE releases? (I developed arthritis in my index finger after about 20 years of mousing and I switched to a trackball because continuing to use a mouse was, literally, a pain. I found that left-clicking with your thumb is ideal. Plus the ergonomics of a track ball sitting next to your keyboard on a shelf below the desktop is better. Avoids “gorilla arm”.)

Maybe it will ignore my old IBM PS2 clickety click keyboards someday.
There will be hell to pay if that happens and there’s no adapter that’ll let my Model M keyboards attach to a Linux system. :^/