Question

0

regain control of mouse by restarting Xorg?

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1241 / 12 Months ago, sun, may 28, 2023, 7:41:42

Lately whilst browsing the web the mouse will "hold down left click" and not let go -- i.e. I get a closed hand icon that can move around but doesn't interact with the screen. Restarting the OS solves it but I don't want to to continually lose what I'm working on.

This is a problem with trackpad or USB mouse equally. From googling it looks like since Ubuntu 8 or earlier there has been a problem with Xorg whereby mouse errors in Firefox cause this problem.

The error was also noticed by this user: USB mouse moves but doesn't accept left clicks

I was able to solve the problem once by closing openbox and restarting with awesome but today that's not working. Any other ideas? Could I restart Xorg without losing everything and thereby "restart the mouse"?

Answers

Only authorized users can answer the question. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

itutejagua

Add To Favorites

Follow

Total Points: 89

Total Questions: 124

Total Answers: 113

Location: British Indian Ocean Territory

Member since Sun, Feb 13, 2022

2 Years ago

answered 12 Months ago inaterested · Accepted Answer

@algebralives:

As it turned out Firefox was causing this problem. Going into a VT (Ctrl+Alt+F6, login, ls, top to orient yourself) and killall firefox fixed the problem.

(If after a minute or two firefox has not died, do top -u algebralives in the VT and look for the process id (PID, leftmost column) associated with the word firefox in the top screen. Hit the letter q whilst the line with firefox in it is still visible, then try kill -9 82734 (assuming 82734 was the PID number associated with Firefox). The -9 has to do with which internal kill code the wider system process sends to the specific firefox daemon process. Nine meaning: no really, seriously, kill it.)

However I hate risking the loss of whatever windows & tabs I have open in my firefox session. Most of the web browsers do not have perfect session management. So since I have plenty of space on this computer, from the virtual terminal (see above) I copied ~/.cache/firefox/ and ~/.config/firefox/ (but not ~/.mozilla/) to a new directory (like cd ~; mkdir firefoxbackup) before killall firefox.

Then I restart Firefox and if it forgot all of my session info, instead of punching through the drywall I just copy ~/firefoxbackup/.cache/firefox/ and ~/firefoxbackup/.config/firefox/ back onto where they were and my session should be as it was.