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Mouse clicks suddenly stopped working in Ubuntu

Mouse clicks suddenly stopped working in Ubuntu

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.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 391
Total answers/comments: 5
Guest [Entry]

"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..."
Guest [Entry]

"Some things to try:

Switch to and from a virtual terminal Ctrl + Alt + F1,Alt + F7.
Activate the screen-lock Ctrl + Alt + L to hopefully reset the X11 window manager.
Restart the window manager with something like ( DISPLAY=0.0 marco --replace ). You need to replace marco with whatever window manager you are running (compiz, unity, metacity, ...).
Close any virtual machines, VNC clients, games, etc. that might have grabbed the mouse. For example: killall vmplayer might initiate a virtual-machine suspend operation."
Guest [Entry]

"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)"
Guest [Entry]

"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."
Guest [Entry]

"I've had, perhaps a similar issue, thought I would chime in on what I did that seems to have worked. BTW, I'm using a wireless Logitech trackball on Ubuntu 10.04.

My issue was that the left button on my Logitech wireless trackball mouse would give me lots of problems. Sometimes it would be severe, sometimes barely noticeable. Clicking would sometimes register as a left click, sometimes register as a double click, and many, many times it would fail to register at all. Dragging and dropping and copy and paste became almost impossible. I could almost never manage to highlight text. In short, life with this mouse became unbearable. This problem affected all programs and windows.

I assumed the problem was with the mouse, even though I've only had it since June or July this year (2010). I focused my efforts on trying to fix the mouse. In the end, I essentially gimped up this mouse trying to make it work, but to no avail.

Finally, I stopped using the mouse completely, and switched to a wired trackball that had never previously given me any problems before. However, after using the wired mouse for a few days, I started to notice that it was having the exact same problem. So, then I realized that in all likelihood, this is a problem with 10.04.

After looking around online for some time trying to come across a solution that worked for me, I stumbled across the post above about using metacity --replace. So, based on that, I was pretty certain that Compiz was the root of my mouse issues. After playing around with Ubuntu Tweak, one of the menu options, ""Enable Metacity's compositing feature"", mentioned that I had to manually disable visual effects in appearance.

So, after disabling Visual Effects (System>Preferences>Appearance>Visual Effects then select None), the mouse is suddenly working again. I don't know if this will be a permanent solution or if it will start giving me problems again, but I thought I'd mention this solution."