[ILUG] Mouse oddness

[Niall O Broin]

For sometime now I've been experiencing mouse oddities and it's only now
that I've pinned it down. I was giving kmail yet another try out and I
noticed that I couldn't select a number of messages by clicking on one, and
then shift-clicking on another (which should select both messages and all
those between them). It would work sometimes, but not always. Sometimes I
did manage to select but as soon as I let go of the shift key, all but the
second message became unselected.

So, I dismissed kmail again, in wonderment that such a basic bug had slipped
through. I decided I had better check it out elsewhere so I fired it up on
my notebook and lo and behold - it worked fine. 

More investigation needed - I fired up xev and sure enough - when I had
either shift key pressed, mouse presses weren't seen by xev. Now and again,
a button press would slip through, but the corresponding button release
wouldn't show up until I let go of the shift key and then it appeared (this
explains the strange unselection behaviour in kmail).

My normal pointing device is a Logitech Trackman Marble connected to a PS/2
mouse port. I replaced it with an MS Intellimouse (only other PS/2 pointing
device to hand) and that worked fine.

Any suggestions, other than "buy another trackball, why doncha ?" (One
thought is to find one of those Logitech PS/2 - serial adapters. This
presumes that I can find one (I did have several) and that the Trackman
Marble is a PS/2 / serial device.)



Niall