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Solving strange mouse behavior in Xfce4



Hello,

I have managed to solve a strange problem with Xfce and mouse button click that I think appeared
some months ago after the typical sequence 'aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade'.

I'm using Debian 'sid' and, although I don't think this could be a broad problem, it may help
somebody in the future.

Although it happened that the problem was not related to an specific package version this are the
current packages that I consider are related to the bug:

xserver-xorg  1:7.3+8
xfce4         4.4.2

The problem I have been suffering for some months was mainly related with the behavior of mouse
left button.

The symptoms were:

* Unable to 'drag' windows clicking on the window title bar
* Unable to drag icons around desktop
* Unable to open the Xfce4 menu
* Unable to open drop down menus like 'File', 'Edit', 'View', ... on apps like Thunar, Iceweasel,
etc.
* Unable to right click on links in order to perform operations like 'Save Link As...' in
Iceweasel

As you can see, it was a rather strange behavior.

I tried a lot of things like: removing Xfce4 (aptitude purge xfce4*) and reinstalling it, deleting
 config files as suggested here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66916) and, as you could
imagine, nothing worked.

Trying to determine if it was an Xfce4 problem or an X problem I installed Icewm and... it worked!
so I was almost convinced it was an Xfce4 problem, but...

After some more tweaking I discovered this in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

...
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "PS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection
...
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Default Screen"
        InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
        InputDevice     "Generic Mouse"
EndSection

I do not remember since when did I have two input devices related with mouses but, as I'm using a
laptop, and I have both track point and touch pad devices on it, I thought each section was
related to one of them.

As a last resort I commented the 'Configured Mouse' section and restarted X but mouse problems
still there. Then, I commented the other one (the 'Generic Mouse') and ... I could not belive it!
it was working! I could now drag windows and icons, and clicking on drop down menus worked too
and, when clicking with the right button on a link on Iceweasel, the proper context menu
appeared!.

As I said, I don't remember exactly when this started to happen (and I still don't know why it
does work with Icewm) but, since I installed and configured this laptop four years ago -later on
2003 IIRC-, and the only maintenance I have been doing on it is regular 'upgrading' via aptitude,
that xorg.conf is probably an automatic conversion of the oldie XF86Config.

Hope this helps somebody someday.

Regards,

Ignacio.


       
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