USB Mouse cursor jumps and buttons get deactivated with two PS/2 devices connected

[Tim Banchi]

This happens when two PS/2 devices are connected at the same time and a USB mouse is primarily used (eg using a Laptop with a PS/2 touchpad with an external USB mouse)
Symptoms: after a while (can be 10 minutes or 1 hour) the mouse cursor starts randomly to jump (mostly down) and up and then the mouse buttons get deactivated (clicking does not have any effect). In that case, moving the mouse marks the underlying text (thus imitating a continuous left-click). This malbehaviour can be temporarily stopped when shortly using one PS/2 device. After a while the same symptoms reappear.

Setup:
Dell D430 docked to a Dell D/dock PD01x. The second PS/2 device is an (switched off) Logitech TrackMan Live! (infrared mouse connected via a PS/2 receiver).
This bug appears under 12.04 LTS Unity and 14.04 with Xfce, KDE or Unity (always using the latest kernels). Using KDE the bug appears more often than when using XFCE.

To resolve the issue:
disconnect the external Trackman Live PS/2 device from the docking station.

This bug drove me crazy. Only by accident I disconnected the Trackman and since then my USB mouse works well again. I verified that the bug reappears as soon as I connect the TrackMan again and I used different USB mice (as I thought that it might be a USB problem). It did not happen under Windows, so it is not hardware related.

If this bug is going to be followed up I can test with a normal PS/2 mouse (instead of the TrackMan Live) if the same bug happens or would be happy to provide logging data.

[Carl Ponder (cponder)]

I have a Dell Latitude E6500.
I'd seen this problem with my 3-button IBM USB mouse, but it went away when I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04.
I have another external IBM USB mouse, this one with a wheel, and am still seeing the problem.
So far I can temporarily stop the problem by un-plugging & re-plugging the mouse; I can also temporarily stop the problem with the command

xinput set-prop 13 "Device Enabled" 0

One thing to note is that the temporary fix works even if the device number DOES NOT match the AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad. I don't believe the issue is a conflict between the two devices for this reason.
I think that the mouse-driver is getting into some crudded-up state that gets reset when I unplug/replug the device or if I run the above "xinput" command.
My best guess is that Ubuntu has real drivers for some mice and uses a buggy default-driver for anything else, and 12.04 included a driver for my first mouse but not my second mouse. Can anyone at Ubuntu confirm this? Or give us a better explanation?

[Carl Ponder (cponder)]

Here's some info that actually makes sense, it says that the wheel-mice use a 4-byte protocol and the Touchpad uses a 3-byte protocol. This could explain how the driver could get confused. Anyone comment?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/17/230839.aspx

Yeah, this is a Windows-affiliated website, but the electronics sounds like an OS-independent issue.
One question is whether the problem re-occurs the first time that you inadvertantly touch the Touchpad.

[Tim Banchi (tim-banchi)]

Update to the filed bug:

I found a PS/2 mouse (3-button + wheel Logitech M-SBF96) and connected it to the PS/2 port of my docking station. I had it connected the whole day and never I had any issues with non-working left clicks or marking all texts.

As soon as I connected the Trackman Live! to the PS/2 port the problems started again after some time.

So apparently there is something amiss with the Trackman Live! connected to the PS/2 port. If I use the Trackman Live! with a Serial to PS/2 adapter there are no problems.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Tim Banchi, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xorg 1363070

Please ensure you have xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes button for attaching additional debugging information.

As well, given the information from the prior release is already available, testing a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xorg (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Tim Banchi (tim-banchi)]

a short update:
I found out that it has nothing to do with whether the second mouse is connected to the PS/2 port or the serial port.
The mouse jumping also happens when connected to the serial port.

Because the other PS/2 mouse never showed any of these problems I guess the culprit is the Logitech Trackman Live (or the receiver of it). However this problem did not occur in Windows, so it might as well be a combination of the specific hardware (Trackman Live, PD01X docking station) with the driver.