I have a problem which is becoming a nightmare, to the extent that I am thinking that it might be easier to just scrap Ubuntu completely and try something else. I have an HP PC running Ubuntu 12.04. When I left-click with my mouse, it sometimes double-clicks (maybe 50% of the time).
So far this has led to: randomly sending unfinished emails, randomly highlighting and deleting things I didn't want to delete whilst writing emails (very frustrating), randomly deleting two browser tabs instead of one (several times), and (in some sense the most annoying) a very very frustating end-user experience when attempting to move windows around on the desktop or to cut-and-paste from a terminal window. Thank goodness for Alt-F7 — but I don't want to have to learn keyboard shortcuts for every program I use as well as for the OS (and not being able to copy-paste is a great loss for me).
I am not the only person with this problem, but googling indicates that there may well be multiple reasons for it; none of the fixes I have read online have worked for me. Let me go through everything, including fixes that have worked for other people but not for me. Oh — I have an hp optical mouse.
It is not a broken mouse. I have tried two mice on my system — both exhibit the problem. Both of these mice work fine on my home laptop also running Ubuntu 12.04.
My
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
is only a few lines long and has no "InputDevice" section.I don't have hald, or the hal package installed.
It started about a week ago, and doesn't seem to be getting any better or worse.
In desperation I just upgraded to 12.10 but this has not fixed the problem and now I am running a distro that is not an LTS (and hence is not ideal for me :- )
But it is rendering my system very hard to use.
Possibly important update: I tried doing some investigations with xev. It seems to me that it looks like a bad connection in these mice -- is this common? I can hold down the mouse button, and then get (mouse click) (pause) (mouse release) (very very short pause) (mouse click) (pause) (mouse release) (very very short pause) (mouse click) etc. I wonder whether e.g. other operating systems say "you can't release and then click again within 0.05 seconds, so that must have been a glitch and I'll assume the button was never released". Can I tell Ubuntu to ignore release-and-then-reclick-almost-instantly events??
This so looks like a bad mouse issue. Maybe I should dig out a newer mouse? I've only tried very old ones :-