Mouseemu installed, not wanted

[Kristleifur Daðason]

Hi,

I have an Intel Mac Mini, a Core Duo 1.66 GHz. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04.1 on it. Hardware info: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/stats/mac_mini_cd_1.66.html

Mouseemu was installed by the Ubuntu installer, and was running on the machine. As a Mini is not a laptop, mouseemu caused the mouse to stop / lag when I typed stuff on the keyboard. It was kind of hard to discover what was going on.

There's some small fix somewhere in the hardware detection routines I guess - the Mac Mini seems to be reported as a laptop, though it doesn't have a trackpad.

[Nick Ellery (nick.ellery)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at [WWW] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in mouseemu.

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

I confirm this bug for iMacs too.

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

Anyway this bug is not related to mouseemu at all! The bug is in the laptop-detect script.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Please run: sh -x /usr/sbin/laptop-detect
and paste in the output.

[Kristleifur Daðason (kristleifur)]

+ PRINTIT=/bin/true
+ [ != ]
+ test -d /proc/pmu
+ [ -r /dev/mem -a -x /usr/sbin/dmidecode ]
+ /sbin/modprobe battery
+ [ -d /proc/acpi/battery ]
+ find /proc/acpi/battery -mindepth 1 -type d
+ results=
+ [ ! -z ]
+ [ -f /proc/apm ]
+ /bin/true We're not on a laptop (no relevant hint found)
+ exit 1

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Seems like laptop-detect correctly recognizes it not to be a laptop. Did you install from the live CD (ubiquity)? Can you please to run it there also?

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

I have tried laptop-detect on ubuntu live and the output is:

+ PRINTIT=/bin/true
+ [ != ]
+ test -d /proc/pmu
+ [ -r /dev/mem -a -x /usr/sbin/dmidecode ]
+ /sbin/modprobe battery
+ [ -d /proc/acpi/battery ]
+ find /proc/acpi/battery -mindepth 1 -type d
+ results=
+ [ ! -z ]
+ [ -f /proc/apm ]
+ /bin/true We're not on a laptop (no relevant hint found)
+ exit 1

Where are the installer logs?

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

They are in /var/log/installer

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

I've checked them, nothing relevant for now. The matter is: what event triggers the installation of mouseemu. I thought it was laptop-detect, but perhaps mouseemu is installed on all macs by default, whether or not the return value of laptop-detect.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

/bin/hw-detect installs mouseemu on the subarchitectures i386/man and amd64/mac

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

That should read "i386/mac" of course. Subarchitecture is what you get when you run "archdetect" on the live cd.

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

Using the live cd, my subarchitecture is "generic". Stupid question, the subarchitecture "mac" is detected on macbooks only?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The subarchitecture "mac" indicates that your system manufacturer according to dmidecode is "Apple Computer, Inc." or "Apple Inc.".

mouseemu wasn't supposed to be specific to laptops. Indeed, when I was testing all of this stuff at first, I was doing so on an iMac, not a laptop. The point of mouseemu is not to do anything about laptops, but to cope with one-button mice. Ubuntu really needs emulation of a second button, at least.

I'd tend to say that the real bug here is that mouseemu is stalling the mouse input channel while waiting for keyboard input. Some of this is tweakable in mouseemu configuration, though that may not be the best answer ... I'd really rather not change hw-detect here until that's investigated further.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(Well, of course we could make it not be installed on Mac Minis, but surely many people use Mac Minis with a one-button Apple mouse.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Also, the detection of "Apple Inc." in archdetect requires a very recent version of libdebian-installer, actually more recent than is in Intrepid as yet. (I was looking at upstream's revision control.)

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

Your answer clarify many doubts. I don't use a mighty mouse or an apple keyboard, hence I've had a very bad experience with mouseemu (no key light, mouse freezes with key press). In any case, mouseemu should use different config values according to the result of the tests:

archdetect [mac, other]
hw-detect [laptop, dekstop]
e.g. mac, desktop: maybe mighty mouse, but touchpad not for sure!

of course there's no way to detect a mighty mouse, right?

And if mouseemu, on a mac desktop, would get automagically installed when a user select that type of mouse from: System -> Preferences -> Mouse ?

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

hw-detect [laptop, desktop] is laptop-detect [laptop, desktop]

and for this example:
mac, desktop: maybe mighty mouse, but touchpad not for sure!
I meant that mouseemu should not block the mouse on keypress.

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

Updates for Ubuntu Intrepid:

mouseemu doesn't freeze anymore on key press. Yet, there are still some troubles: the lights on the keyboard don't turn on and some shortcuts don't work (e.g. F11 for full screen mode); these two issues are fixed when I remove mouseemu from the system.

[Henrik Rydberg (rydberg)]

On machines for which the touchpad driver reports the BTN_TOOL_DOUBLETAP button, mouseemu is no longer needed, since emulation of the right button is made with two-finger click in synaptics. Given the many strange problems, I'd vote for disabling the mouseemu driver at least in the aforementioned cases.

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

I've got an iMac and I don't use any mouse (or keyboard) from apple; thus I don't need any kind of emulation, this case should be reckoned.

[Dominic Baranski (dominic-baranski)]

I was also affected by this bug recently. I use a Mac Pro (not a notebook) and Ubuntu 8.10 installed mouseemu by default and it broke my forward and back buttons on my mouse. I had a heck of a time figuring out what was wrong since the button presses didn't event come up in xev! after un-installing mouseemu everything works perfectly again.

[Alex Murray (alexmurray)]

As mentioned in bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mouseemu/+bug/120102/comments/6 I really think mouseemu should not be installed by default on machines it is not needed on - see rydberg's comment above https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mouseemu/+bug/251830/comments/19 - since this breaks a bunch of stuff as mentioned in this bug, and also remaps F11 and F12 which is completely unintuitive and broken.

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

F11 uh? That's why I couldn't switch to fullscreen with that shortcut!

[Alex Murray (alexmurray)]

See this is totally bogus - its a massive WTF? Why does my F11 produce a middle mouse click? (especially since lots of applications use F11 for fullscreen as well, this breaks them too) - mouseemu should definitely not override F11 and F12 and it should not be installed by default, it causes way more trouble than its worth

[Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33)]

Marking some duplicates. This package has really been unwanted for several releases of Ubuntu. It causes many complaints in the forum.

[Νίκος Αλεξανδρής (nikos.alexandris)]

I just want to add a confirmation and an additional wish to get "mouseemu" out of the default installation for at least the mac-machines for which it causes trouble (like the disabled "Caps Lock" green light).

Kind regards, Nikos

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Same here too. I'm using Jaunty on Macbook 2,1.
The touchpad driver (synaptics? appletouch? I don't remember) is configured to emulate right and middle click so everything works after uninstalling mouseemu.
Also see Bug #218263: [Mac] numlock and capslock leds don't light up unless mouseemu is removed

[Salvador Diaz (salvadordiaz)]

After trying several things to get the extra side buttons on my microsoft mouse to work (which btw work fine on another ubuntu install on a desktop pc) I had completely given up.

Then I started looking about the caps lock light not working and found out that it was mouseemu's fault, so I uninstalled it and lo and behold: my side buttons started to work ! Please, get ride of mouseemu already (at least on macs)

[Matteo Gazzoni (matteo.gazzon)]

Karmic alpha 3 status update:

The behaviour of mouseemu is regressed:
- No caps lock light
- Mouse freeze on key press

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package hw-detect - 1.72ubuntu4

---------------
hw-detect (1.72ubuntu4) karmic; urgency=low

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Drop disk-detect/iscsi/enable template, which is no longer used.
  * Don't install mouseemu on Intel Mac desktops (LP: #251830).

  [ Mario Limonciello ]
  * Add support for Dell Driver Injection disk v1, an integrated flash media based
    solution for adding in drivers after OS launches. This feature will be on
    upcoming Dell servers. (LP: #341526)

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:59:27 +0100

[Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33)]

In #218263, it was mentioned that mouseemu is still installed on Intel Mac Laptops, but not the Intel Mac desktops. If this is the case, this is still an issue since it causes the same problems.

[Jo Shields (directhex)]

@Ricky Campbell

Bugs in mouseemu itself should be filed against mouseemu - e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mouseemu/+bug/419947 was recently fixed which broke multi-button mice

[Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33)]

OK? If I marked that as a dup of this it is because it was marked against the other bug.

[Νίκος Αλεξανδρής (nikos.alexandris)]

Still a problem for a MacBook Pro 5,1 (after a clean Oneiric install).