Intermittent mouse button failure

English Hardware
1

I’m running Suse 11.1 with KDE on my desktop. Occasionally
(maybe once or twice a week) my mouse buttons stop working.
Everything else continues to work fine – programs continue to
run, I can move the mouse around on screen, but none of the
mouse buttons do anything.

This seems to happen just after I open a window and mostly
(but not always) when I open Firefox.

The only way I have found to fix the problem is to find another
computer on the network, log in to my computer as root and shutdown/restart the computer.

This is becoming old very fast. Anyone have any ideas? Even
a better way to make the problem go away might help.
Remotely killing firefox and other running tasks doesn’t help.

2

that has happened several times lately…see:

http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/laptop/415437-my-mouse-acting-weird.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/415040-logitech-cordless-mouse.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/415322-still-losing-my-mouse.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/413639-mouse-problems.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/402451-kde4-no-buttons-working.html

i can only GUESS that all might be connected by using the same version
(11.1) and desktop environment (KDE4.x)…

try turning off desktop effects…

–
natural_pilot

3

This is not a solution to your problem.
You may not need to restart it from another computer. Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a terminal screen, login as root and execute the following:

init 3
init 5

This will not save your work but will restart GUI.

If you cant get Ctrl+Alt+F1 working, press Alt+F2, type konsole, Press Enter and do the following:

su
init 3
init 5

As a third alternative, try Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart GUI.

4

Thanks – That’s not a cure, but it might make the
recovery easier. I’ll try them the next time the
failure occurs.