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"Crazy Mouse" Syndrome

No, Crazy Mouse was not an obscure Sioux cheiftan of the late 1800's who had an uncontrollable drive to bite every cheese-like object he saw and thus had a medical syndrome named after him.

The Problem

We are talking a lunatic mouse that scoots uncontrollably around the screen highlighting everything in sight. It can happen in a console or an X-window. Here is how I solved the problem on a fresh Debian install recently:

Applicability Warning

This article is based on a Debian Woody (3.0 R1) install, and the specifics may or may not apply to your distro / installation.  I.E.  YMMV  &  caveat emptor.  Furthermore, we have observed the problem only in Debian.

The Console Solution

The key is to get the right type into the mouse configuration file. For gpm on Debian, this is in 
/etc/gpm.conf
the line is, guess what, "type=". There are 3 ways to make the change: However, there is no point in trying to make a change if you don't know what to change to. 
gpm -t help     (see less for dealing w/ the output)
will show the available types.  I have a generic wheel mouse and decided that "imps2" looked promising.

Then I fired up  mcedit  (my favorite editor) 

mcedit /etc/gpm.conf 
and changed the "type=" line to "type=imps2" (and saved the change, of course). 
BTW, "type=fuimps2" also worked, but I am going with "type=imps2" for now. 

The last thing I had to do was restart gpm: 

/etc/init.d/gpm restart
Voila, problem solved.  Now to remember how to fix the X problem ...

Notes

less

gpm -t help                   produces a lot more than 25 lines of output, so I recommend

gpm -t help | less            or better yet

gpm -t help | less -S~# 12     (read the less man page, it's very instructive)

To Do:

Add X solution, continue better formatting, standardize code formatting conventions -- suggestions welcome

-- Rick Archibald - 25 Oct 2003

© f.a.archibald.iii 2003

Topic CrazyMouseSyndrome . { Edit | Attach | 5B%5EA-Za-z%5D">Ref-By | Printable | Diffs | r1.4 | > | r1.3 | > | r1.2 | More }
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