Question

This is a weird one. For some reason, last night my mouse partially stopped working. Movement is fine, but the mouse buttons don't work. Mainly it's the left button, but occasionally the right click and scroll-wheel fail too.

Initially I thought it could be the mouse itself (the left button seemed to get a bit "soft" recently), but I tried another mouse and had the same issue. Both are USB wireless optical mice. The keyboard is working okay 95%, only problem is Alt+Tab doesn't seem to work. Both keys work fine independently.

At the time it happened I was using Chrome, I dragged to scrollbar to scroll and when I released the mouse it was still holding scrollbar.

I'm using Ubuntu 9.10, I upgraded weeks ago and everything was working fine so I don't think it's related to that. I also hadn't run any updates (I have now just in case something fixed it). But no luck.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Mostly this may be reason :

The bug is well known. Look for example here:

Bug Link

A common workaround is exporting GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before running the application with click problems.

(source)

Answer 2

From the bug mentioned by Joe above (emphasis mine):

So here the bug and workarounds.

For example on youtube, whilst it recognises my mouse moving over various buttons, actual mouse clicks are not recognised. I can navigate using 'tab' but this is very painful. I can also right click. The problem doesn't occur with other flash players, e.g. swfdec-mozilla.

WORKAROUND 1: Disable compiz
WORKAROUND 2: Remove flashplugin-nonfree / flashplugin-installer and install from adobe
WORKAROUND 3: Open a terminal and enter:

   gksudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer

Then add: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before the last line of text.

Note: The only workaround for Chrome/Chromium users is to disable compiz.

Answer 3

I found that this was just a problem with the mouse. The left button has pretty much stopped working. Other buttons seemed to stop working because the left button gets "jammed". After restarting with the other mouse plugged in, it worked fine.

Damn, I seem to have gone through so many mice and/or keyboards recently...