weird mousing on several Debian systems
Weird mousing on two Debian systems
(1) Last night, when I started firefox on my AMD-64 etch machine, it
complained firefox was already running. Fair enough -- I have one
shared home directory used on several machines, and it probably *was*
already running somewhere else. Firefox seems to do its locking on an
all-or-nothing basis, and so it refused to run. I didmissed the message
window and went to do something else.
But after that, the mouse didn't work properly. It would move around
OK, but I couldn't click on anything.
But ctrl-alt-backspace still killed X, and brought me back to gdm,
which let me log in and after that everything worked properly. I tried
starting firefox again, gor the same no-go message, but when I dismissed
it this time everything was OK.
The most recent upgrade to this machine was a week ago (as mentioned in
one of the messages in the Debian bug report log
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=379480),
and it has performed properly from then to last night, when this
behaviour suddenly happened.
Since ctrl-alt-backspace appeared to solve the problem, I decided not to
investigate -- after all, what was left to investigate?
(2) But then this morning I logged in through gdm on another machine, a
32-bit sarge system. Again the mouse misbehaved, but differently. This
time, it would register mouse clicks only when I clicked slightly below
the icon or menu item. This was impossible on the icons on the bottom
bar, btu I could gain access to applications using the background's
menu. By the way, gdm is the screen manager on both this machine and the
AMD-64 I mentioned above, and this is one of the other machines where I
use the same home directory, NFS-mounted.
Once I started firefox, mouse behaviour changed. It seemed to sense
window boundaries correctly, but I had to click near icons instead of on
them, and not always in the same direction.
I exited icewm through a regular logout, got back to gdm and started up
again, remembering last night's experiences. Back in icewm. I not had a
one-centimetre offset to the right; i.e., to click on an icon or menu
item or scroll-bar one centinetre to the right of where it was. A few
icons could not be clicked at all (like the forward and back icons in
firefox). This behaviour was the same for the toolbar at the bottom of
the screen. I logged out bu clicking 1 cm to the right of the logout
menu item, and was back in gdm.
This time I decided to check out gdm.s icons. Its language, session,
and actions items lit up when the mouse was one cm to the right of them.
Now I have six virtual X consoles. This behaviour occurs on only one of
them, the one I reach with ctrl-alt-F11.
I logged in on another virtual console just now to send this message,
and everything is behaving itself.
Any ideas?
-- hendrik
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