Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

After a long enough length of time (e.g. 4+ hours) on most sessions, the mouse pointer goes crazy
I'm not sure when it started doing it, I have only been using this puppy since about December 2020

This is Bionicpup64, frugal-installed to USB.
It is a laptop with bog-standard/default built-in touchpad (Acer Aspire E 13) but the problem also affects (at least) 1 other laptop in the household which uses a clone of the same USB.
On this laptop it is impossible to regain control of the mouse pointer, requiring a hard reset
On the other laptop (a Lenovo Thinkpad from ~2014) it's possible to control the mouse as long as one of the buttons is held down, which means it can be shut down smoothly
The other laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad as just mentioned) was used with Slacko6.3 for a few years without this problem

I made a video of this but it's 40Mb and just looks like a mouse pointer rapidly glitching around the screen to random positions

The only applications running are Firefox, Thunderbird and Veracrypt. Closing the applications with ctrl+f4 doesn't stop the problem
It -might- happen after touching the mousepad but I'm not certain of this. I would put it down to hardware except that it returns to normal after resetting and there is such a similar g;itch on the other laptop model.

I think I would like to try and reinstall/repair/rebuild JWM and/or x but don't know how to go about this on puppy

impossible to regain control of the mouse pointer, requiring a hard reset

You should be able to restart X (Xwindows, Xorg) by pressing ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X
then typing xwin then press the Enter/Return key to restart X (and the mouse).

You should be able to shut down any applications first, using the keyboard.
You can switch the focus to each application by pressing alt+tab.
You can switch between JWM virtual desktops by pressing alt+1, alt+2, etc.
.
You can get the JWM menu by pressing F12 (or maybe F10??), then use the arrow keys to select a menu item, then press Enter to execute it.
There should be a menu item to change the mouse settings.

If you kill X, you can type reboot, or poweroff to shut down properly.
Or kill X then press ctrl+alt+del to reboot properly.

If I am using a mouse on a laptop.
I always turn off the touchpad.

It is easy to accidentally do something on the touchpad and have it try to take over control of the pointer.

williams2 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:18 pm

impossible to regain control of the mouse pointer, requiring a hard reset

You should be able to restart X (Xwindows, Xorg) by pressing ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X
then typing xwin then press the Enter/Return key to restart X (and the mouse).

If you kill X, you can type reboot, or poweroff to shut down properly.
Or kill X then press ctrl+alt+del to reboot properly.

On the Lenovo Thinkpad:-
The ctrl+alt+backspace keyboard shortcut worked to kill x
However on restarting X the mouse didn't work. It no longer glitched around the screen but just didn't move at all
I killed x again and did 'reboot now'
There was a problem saving the session. After ~30 minutes it hadn't finished writing the savefile
So I hard reset (=powered off the machine)
On booting again, x crashed out into the shell immediately after the point where it shows the mouse pointer and a black screen (the mouse pointer came up briefly so I thought x was starting but the desktop didn't appear before x exited)
There was a brief message at the top of the shell saying "x exited" and listing some possible commands including xorgwizard
I ran xorgwizard and was given 4 options to set (iirc) [1] the display driver [2] the resolution [3] something else e.g. frame rate which I didn't use [4] reset x config
I checked the display driver and resolution were okay and reset x config
On rebooting x still wouldn't load

(so I have recovered from an earlier USB image)

==
[conjecture!]

I guess a problem something along the lines of:-
- during normal use, an entry inside a driver file that controls the touchpad is being erased/overwritten/corrupted
- rebooting restores this entry, but restarting x first before rebooting sets it (persistently) to a blank state
- xorgwizard checks the file is present but doesn't restore it, with the result that it fails to rebuild a working x environment
- [more speculatively, if the entry is being overwritten with unreadable data is it possible this would prevent the savefile from being written at the end of the session?]
(I would like to look at what files the mouse driver uses. I tried /dev/input/mice and /dev/input/mouse0 but these can't be opened as text)

bigpup wrote: ↑Wed Mar 31, 2021 2:04 am

If I am using a mouse on a laptop.
I always turn off the touchpad.

It is easy to accidentally do something on the touchpad and have it try to take over control of the pointer.

On laptops like the Lenovo Thinkpad that have a touchpad and also a 'pointing stick' in the body of the keyboard, is it possible to turn off the pointing stick separately from the touchpad?

On this model the pointing stick works and is detected by puppy, and it is part of the detachable/replaceable keyboard sheet which is physically separate from the touchpad - so potentially it might be a separate device logically also, with its own IRQ etc.

(I should be clear the pointing stick doesn't fix or seem to be anything to do with the problem on the Lenovo Thinkpad, and the Aspire E13 doesn't have one.)

It turns out I can fix this and regain control of the mouse by using the laptop's Fn+F7 combination to turn the touchpad off and on again.

I don't know much about these keyboard shortcuts and whether they are handled by the OS at all or if they work at a lower level underneath it.

After this is done the problem normally comes back. Maybe every 5-10 minutes

On other linux OSes, this type of problem can be caused by the touchpad driver, but I don't know how to troubleshoot this.

- with keyboards in x it is possible to visualize the keypresses in the terminal (which I think is by running a specific program) but is there is similar program to display or log mouse movements? (seems to be lots of stuff to control mouse from keyboard but I just want to know what it thinks it is doing)

- is it simple to switch from the Synaptics driver (which xinput says is in use) to Mtrack to see if that will work?

- alternatively is it something like I shouldn't have mtrack and synaptics both installed and need to remove mtrack?

@PuppyandCo :-

Merely to satisfy my own curiosity, like.....what happens if you plug in & use a conventional USB mouse (wired OR wireless)?

Mike.

What are you using to move the mouse pointer around when this happens?

I assumed you had an external mouse plugged into the computer.

Go into the computers bios setup and see if it has any settings to enable/disable any of these built in controls.
The touchpad or the pointing stick.

Most likely the driver to control both is not in Puppy Linux.
The driver in Puppy is kind of a general touchpad driver, that tries to work with every possible touchpad.

Pup-Sysinfo->Devices->Input
See if it has any info on the touchpad and pointer.
If yes.
Post what it says, so we can see what specific hardware it may be.
Bionicpup could be using the wrong driver.

Could also try to use Fossapup64 9.5 version of Puppy Linux.
It is using a much newer Linux kernel and much newer other support files and programs.
They may better support this hardware.

bigpup wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 5:53 pm

What are you using to move the mouse pointer around when this happens?

I assumed you had an external mouse plugged into the computer.

Go into the computers bios setup and see if it has any settings to enable/disable any of these built in controls.
The touchpad or the pointing stick.

touchpad only on this laptop (Acer ES1-311-C4Q6)
I have another laptop with a similar problem (Lenovo Thinkpad), with the same puppy, which has a pointing-stick - but want to fix the problem on the Acer first
the advanced settings are already disabled in the bios (and have to be for the touchpad to work in puppy)

bigpup wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 5:53 pm

Most likely the driver to control both is not in Puppy Linux.
The driver in Puppy is kind of a general touchpad driver, that tries to work with every possible touchpad.

Pup-Sysinfo->Devices->Input
See if it has any info on the touchpad and pointer.
If yes.
Post what it says, so we can see what specific hardware it may be.
Bionicpup could be using the wrong driver.

Pup-Sysinfo immediately crashes the system as soon as the Loading... box comes up
The specific hardware isn't described on the manufacturer's website / spare parts lists etc
but in windows it uses this firmware: Firmware_Synaptics_1.17

Which seemed to match what Puppy can see:-

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0007 Version=01b1
N: Name="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input9
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event11
B: PROP=5
B: EV=b
B: KEY=e520 610000 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=660800011000003

i.e. the manufacturer on windows and puppy both using a generic driver?

bigpup wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 5:53 pm

Could also try to use Fossapup64 9.5 version of Puppy Linux.
It is using a much newer Linux kernel and much newer other support files and programs.
They may better support this hardware.

I wouldn't have thought it's that the touchpad isn't supported by the version of puppy as it seemed to work fine for about three months, a very similar problem is affecting another laptop with different touchpad hardware, and (for the other laptop, the Lenovo) I've been using it with slacko for years
Also I don't want to spend days setting everything up again from scratch

I was thinking along the lines of reinstalling the driver or trying other released versions of it but I can't see where to do that

mikewalsh wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 5:34 pm

@PuppyandCo :-

Merely to satisfy my own curiosity, like.....what happens if you plug in & use a conventional USB mouse (wired OR wireless)?

Mike.

using a wired usb mouse and not touching the touchpad seemed better at first - but when the touchpad would glitch, the wired mouse freezes up. Using the touchpad then glitches the mouse pointer and turning the touchpad on and off (with the function key) causes the touchpad to come back but not the wired mouse. The wired mouse has to be unplugged and plugged in again. That's after it happening only twice though

I tried this command given on forums for resetting synaptics mouse drivers
modprobe -r psmouse

but the mouse stopped working after that until I reset

Most recently the system crashed to a black screen with frozen white cursor and then always crashed on startup. I have gone back to a usb image from 14th March so will see if this recurs.

Yes it has recurred. It seems to be progressive, it gets more extreme as a session goes on. The first couple of times it does it it's possible to get out of it by leaving the mouse still for a second. I would love to see a log of what the mouse driver is doing, or to just reinstall the mouse driver.

10/04/2021 - I think it might be an electronics problem. It seems I can make the mouse start glitching by drumming my fingers on the handrest area next to the touchpad.
This laptop looks like it will be a pain to open but I'll try that next.

In case anyone else googles to this due to similar problems:-

The Aspire E13 ES1-311-C4Q6 is quite easy to open. The touchpad is underneath the battery which is very long and flat, and totally unmarked, the battery is held in with just a couple of small screws at either end, plus some plastic clips. Also need to move some speaker wires out of the way but the touchpad is just held in by 3 screws and two sticky tabs of conductive tape (the tape tabs are important so don't damage them!).

The areas for the tape are marked out, and one bit of the tape was in the wrong place going over the PCB tracks so I moved that. Other than that it wasn't dirty or dusty. I guess I might have screwed it back in looser.

I have since found this page about an Acer ES1-111M-C3KJ, this tape is actually a trace for carrying current to ground, so I reckon it being over the tracks didn't matter but the problem was it didn't have a wide enough contact - with the marked-out area which is actually like a copper "ground"-plate. The mouse glitches feeling like they were getting "progressively" worse over time maybe was due to tiny amounts of charge building up.

https://www.zachpoff.com/resources/acer ... chpad-fix/

So far it has stopped glitching.

Thanks to all for the suggestions!

The Lenovo Thinkpad I will see if there is anything similar. An odd coincidence installing puppy on two laptops with similar, previously-unnoticed hardware issues with their touchpads but that could happen

Thanks for the tip. I have an E11 with the same issue. Will dismantle when i get the chance.

That is some very good info about how the touchpad is installed in the laptop.

If you use an external mouse.
Always best to turn off the touchpad and keep it turned off.
Only want control to be done, by one device, only.

Thank you for the information on using an external mouse on a laptop, BigPup! I had read through the post when I came upon your reply and in Easy OS 5.7, I simply turned the tap function for the touchpad off and voila! No more shaking mouse! Thanks so much!