Erratic, jumping, skipping mouse cursor

[Sepero]

Symptoms:
When attempting to move the mouse, the cursor flies around the screen almost randomly. It usually ends up in a corner of the screen and random clicking may happen also. This problem apears to happen with USB and PS/2 mice.

Solution:
Uninstall 'gpm', or kill it's process before starting X.


P.S.
It took me about 2 hours to figure out that tid-bit of information, and I'm far beyond the newbie stage. I sure hope someone benefits from this. :)

[andysimmons]

Solution #2: Check your mouse driver (/etc/X11/name_of_x_config_file). Using the IMPS/2 driver when you should be using PS/2 can cause the same problem.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by Sepero

P.S.
It took me about 2 hours to figure out that tid-bit of information, and I'm far beyond the newbie stage. I sure hope someone benefits from this. :)

*cough* Searching the JL forums for 'erratic mouse' would have found all sorts of similiar threads which some I have always responded with 'check to see if gpm is running and if so, stop the gpm service from starting'. ;)

I believe you can use ?? /dev/gpmdata (something like that) as the mouse device in X as that is supposed to allow the mouse in gpm and X to coexist without causing the erratic mouse behaviour.

JL forum search results for 'erratic mouse' (http://justlinux.com/forum/search.php?s=&action=showresults&searchid=693439&sortby=lastpost&sortorder=descending).

[Sepero]

*cough* Thanks for the none sarcastic remark. *cough*

Yes, I did come to the answer by searching our lovely forum here, but not after futilely searching google. (I always G4L first) Also, I didn't see any posts that said "Do This ___ ...and your problem will be solved", so I created one for everybody. ;)

Please feel free to tag this thread with *keywords* if you can think of any. I tried to put the ones I could think of in the title.


< searching keywords >

erratic mouse jumps skips skippy pointer gpm

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by Sepero
*cough* Thanks for the none sarcastic remark. *cough*


It wasn't meant to be sarcastic (hence the smilie), but only a helpful hint on JL forum searching of which I post here in the forums quite often.