Input cursor jumps to wherever the mouse is.

English Hardware
#1

hardware: HP Pavilion dv6985se Notebook PC, running OpenSUSE 11.1. This happens consistently in a variety of applications - Gmail, OpenOffice Word, and Tomboy Notes to name three. It seems to happen when I type several keys in succession quickly, and then have a slight halt before or after hitting the space bar. I will see if I can make it happen now by putting the mouse over “Submit” and typing in the manner described so that it will jump and thereby Submit this message.

thethethe thenthe the the thenhthen

#2

It sounds as if you may have accidentally switched on an accessibility
feature called ‘slow keys’ by pressing on the shift key for a few
seconds. This is a show stopper that has been reported in numerous bug
reports and has caused many, many users who’ve never heard of ‘slow
keys’ to believe that their installation is completely broken.

Fortunately you can turn it off with just the mouse by going to the K
menu -> Control Centre -> Regional & Accessibility -> Accessibility ->
Activation Gestures, and untick the first box (‘Use gestures for
activating slow keys and sticky keys’). Also go to the Keyboard
Filters tab and untick the ‘Use slow keys’ box if it is ticked. Press
apply and you should be OK.

if that is not it, then look around in the accessiblilty section and
see if there is another physically challenged helper app with is
misunderstanding your typing intentions…

–
brassy

#3

Thanks for taking a shot at this. I think that I already knew about most of these, but you did encourage me to take another look thru the menu system and make some tweaks, then reboot. Hopeless. I suspect the problem is related to reestablishing the input cursor after an Autosave and Page Refresh. I made a mistake when I first got this machine - I blew away its original OS - Windows Vista Home Premium. I need to reestablish that OS and see if it happens there. If not, HP or Intel probably did some relevant driver additions that at some point will be folded back to the latest Linux Distro. Fortunately, I don’t do a lot of message or letter composing, so I will just muddle along somehow.

#4

sorry i missed it the first time (and probably the second also), but
just take a look in the bios…maybe there is something in there
to do with accessibility or keyboard blah blah…

mmmmmm…and, just for fun check the HP web site for and poke in any
bios upgrade they have…oh no…i just took a look and it seems HP has
provided lots of driver updates and at least one “critical security
update”…all for Vista/XP …

i didn’t drag the web (google) to see if others with your machine are
having the same problem, but it COULD be that the keyboard driver the
openSUSE install script selected is not the best one for your
hardware…you might experiment by going into YaST and then Hardware >
Keyboard Layout > Layout (tab) and spin the “Type” line to something
else that looks like it might work…CAUTION: you could get into a
situation that your machine then fails to do anything…so, before you
start that, do a good back…at the very least a recoverable copy of
/etc/X11/xorg.conf (there may be a real need to backup other files, i
do not know but suggest you SHOULD have a recovery plan before you
spin the roulette wheel)…

on another front: buying a diesel engined vehicle and putting in it
petroleum cracked/distilled/refined for a gasoline engine is not the
best way to get the performance boost you want, or any performance
whatsoever…

–
brassy

#5

thanks for your insightful remarks, once again. I have a plan that is a little higher level than your recommendations, but let me cover your last point first. I think that most people on these forums expect to be able to purchase the latest generic hardware from mainline manufacturers, and to be able to install and experiment with any Linux Distro that we want(Windows distro too). That is my intention, and as a starter I have split my C:\ drive - pardon my Windows accent, hard to overcome - into about eight 50 and 20 gb partitions. Into the first I have placed OpenSuse. Since I really do not want to lose access to that, my next step is to gain confidence that I can install other Linux and Windows OS’s into the remaining partitions, and recover the MBR so that Open Suse’s GRUB is used to boot them all. This is just a matter of my getting the time to practice this process - I have certainly read all the material on this that I feel I am capable of absorbing. So once I have done that, I will install my HP supplied Home Premium Recovery Disks into SDA2, and probably Windows 7 when it is finalized into SDA3, and other Linux distros into the remaining partitions. Then compare the various distros for how this cursor thing plays out. As a Windows guy, I expect Plug and Play to just work, no matter what the OS, without me needing to become a driver guru. No offense intended to those who ARE motivated to be driver gurus.

#6

> As a Windows guy, I expect Plug and Play to just work, no matter
> what the OS, without me needing to become a driver guru. No
> offense intended to those who ARE motivated to be driver gurus.

i’m certainly not offended, but i hasten to point out that expecting
plug and play to ‘just work’ when it NEVER does until and unless a
driver is programmed to sit between the software and the hardware…
like, buy a Power PC based MacBook Pro, or a SUN SPARC, or a Cray and
show me how Win7’s most advanced plug and play ever ‘just works’ for
you, with that hardware…

see, you come from using a system in which the software AND hardware
makers work together to sell a retail package which works
fine and dandy together…plug and play just hummmms along, piece of
cake…great ‘user experience’ (usually…until the virus sneaks in)…

but, the same is NOT a fact of life in the consumer computer market
with (say) BeOS, Atari, BSD, Unix, or Linux…(by the way, most
Crays can run Linux right out of the box…and the largest majority of
all supercomputers on earth run Linux, but i digress…)

so, until and unless things change for the consumer computer market
you MUST pay attention when buying hardware if you want to use any
operating system other than Redmond’s…

HP makes LOTS of enterprise level servers which are fully certified
and drivered to ‘plug and play’ with enterprise level Linux see:
http://hp.com/linux…

and they make several laptops which ship with Linux…there is also
full driver support for Linux on those (i have NO idea if you can
shoehorn Win7 on those, but i guess you might be able to, maybe)…

however, the laptop you bought was designed, and drivered for
Windows…if it will run (any) Linux (and everything works–mouse,
sleep switch, web cam, mike, speakers, etc etc etc) you are
LUCKY…very lucky…and it is only due to the skill and cunning of
driver gurus who (usually without the help of either the hardware
manufacturers or M$ figure out a way to get purpose built Windows
Hardware to respond to Linux software…

i remind you, i am not offended…AND, i intended neither disrespect
nor to be offensive toward you in any way…really!

–
brassy

#7

I finally gained enough confidence that i could use grub on a cd to boot from wherever i want when my mbr gets destroyed, and then i loaded the Restore Disks for Windows Home Premium. Not too surprisingly, my whole laptop disk got reformatted to its original state - a small restore partition on D:\ and the remainder of the drive allocated to C:. No matter, it is a pleasure to be able to type this note without the cursor jumping all over the place every few seconds. This is clearly a driver issue - NOT a hardware issue. The right way for me to help resolve this for OpenSuse is to get involved in the 11.2 test process. I would like to do this but it involves a time commitment. My plan would be to let Windows have the MBR and the whole laptop drive, create an ext3 partition on my external USB drive, put 11.2 on this and boot using grub from a live cd to test it.

#8

sounds like a good plan…

be sure and post help needed info into the correct forum:
http://forums.opensuse.org/pre-release-beta/

and, shoot the bug to the developers pretty quick…11.2 is moving
fast now, not much time left to influence it…

but, if it is actually a driver problem…hmmmm…well, move quickly…

–
goldie

#9

vihonh wrote:
> I finally gained enough confidence that i could use grub on a cd to boot
> from wherever i want when my mbr gets destroyed, and then i loaded the
> Restore Disks for Windows Home Premium. Not too surprisingly, my whole
> laptop disk got reformatted to its original state - a small restore
> partition on D:\ and the remainder of the drive allocated to C:. No
> matter, it is a pleasure to be able to type this note without the cursor
> jumping all over the place every few seconds. This is clearly a driver
> issue - NOT a hardware issue. The right way for me to help resolve this
> for OpenSuse is to get involved in the 11.2 test process. I would like
> to do this but it involves a time commitment. My plan would be to let
> Windows have the MBR and the whole laptop drive, create an ext3
> partition on my external USB drive, put 11.2 on this and boot using grub
> from a live cd to test it.

Is the “mouse” on your computer a touchpad? It sounds as if you need
to disable tapping. The only way that I know to do this requires
editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, find the lines that mention MaxTapTime,
and set the value to 0. My line looks like

Option “MaxTapTime” “0”

There is a problem with 11.2 in that the incorrect driver is selected
for my touchpad. I reported this with M2, but it has not yet been
fixed. I plan to revisit this problem with M6.

#10

That’s what I thought. You could install ‘touchfreeze’. This little program makes your touchpad configurable. “Disable when typing” is the beautiful option. Since touchfreeze crashes on Factory I experience the exact behaviour on my laptop.