Mouse “jumps” from one screen to the other

[Michael B. Trausch]

This has got to be the strangest bug I have ever filed here. There is no debugging data, by the way—I am running Feisty, fully updated.

I have dual-display mode with an i810. No Xinerama, so these are two different X11 screens. Or at least, they're supposed to be. According to $DISPLAY, they are, but this behavior is rather strange and seems to defy typical and historic dual-head, multiple screen behavior. No desktop effects or anything fancy—just GNOME and my applications. Of course, I actively use both heads to work on. Sometimes, when I move from the secondary display to the primary display, say, into a terminal window, and run an application and then exit the application, the mouse cursor will move all the way to the top left, taking focus with it.

I have checked the usual hardware problems that would force a jump of the mouse; the mouse itself is clean, the surface is clean, and a replacement does the same. It is *not* hardware, and the “mouse-jump” occurs the moment I exit emacs.

This problem is reproducible 100% of the time so far for me. For example, I have Epiphany running on screen two right now—that is where I am entering this bug in. I move the mouse to the primary screen, and my gnome-terminal (the only application running over there right now) gains focus. I type execute emacs, and then quit (C-x C-c) with the keyboard. *The GNOME Terminal never regains focus.* Instead, Epiphany (on the second screen) has the focus. At this point, the mouse is still on my primary screen. However, the moment that I press Alt-Tab, the mouse “jumps” to the secondary display, top left corner (0x0), where the focus is with Epiphany. Now, I have found that I can restore focus to the primary screen—and retain the mouse there—by pressing Alt-F1 (pulling up the Applications menu on the secondary display, which should not have focus) and pressing <ESC>, without pressing Alt-Tab. After I press Alt-F1,ESC, I can Alt-Tab normally on my primary display, and the mouse does not run away on me, and returns focus back to my GNOME Terminal.

This has got to be the most minor—and yet most annoying—bug that I have reported. I thought I was going crazy at first. I am not, but I think I would probably think I were if I didn’t see it for myself.

The only way I can think of to show what is actually happening would be to use a camcorder, but I don’t have one. In any case, it's strange—and not hardware, so it’s outside of my ability to fix it.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Mar 27 01:54:02 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Uname: Linux pepper.trausch.us 2.6.20-13-generic #2 SMP Sun Mar 25 00:21:25 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

I do not know if this is going to be helpful at all, but I have attached my X.org configuration anyway. It is the only thing that I can think of that is even remotely related to the bug that I can supply…

This is a configuration for dual-head mode with two virtual desktops; unlike Xinerama, where it is one big virtual desktop. I hope that it—or the report itself—is useful in tracking it down. Also, my apologies. I absolutely do not have the slightest idea what package the bug would be in.

[Nanley Chery (nanoman)]

Do you still have this problem in Feisty Final?

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

Yes, I did, up until the time in which my old laptop (which I had the dual-head configuration setup for) died due to… non-natural causes. I can no longer verify the situation, however, because I do not have a way to run dual-head with a driver that works well enough to do it. I have currently a new system, different video chip, and I’m not even sure that I will be able to get dual-head working properly; little else in this driver seems to…

[trollord (trollenlord)]

Terribly sorry to hear that your laptop died. Unfortunately if there is no failing exhibit it is nearly impossible to work on your original problem so I will mark this as Invalid. I also tried finding other duplicate/related bug reports and there do not seem to be good candidates.

The behaviour however most likely was due the loaded synaptics driver in case you had any ps/2 (emulating) mouse device present. Any sort of touchpad or tablet is most often the most likely candidate for such behaviour, or the other mice being detected as such (synaptics looks for ps/2 mice generally).