Mouse cursor sensitivity varies & mouse jerkiness

barrowaj · n00b Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 33 Location: Austin, TX

One irritating thing I have noticed with my setup is that sometimes when I come into X, my mouse speed is slower than usual. This only happens about 1 out of 4 times I boot, but it is annoying that this is not consistant. Restarting X does not seem to reset this issue; I have to completely reboot.

I use a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer via USB. Does anyone know why the mouse sensitivity should vary like this?

Also, I notice that when loading from the hard drive, my mouse movement is jerky. I'm not saying that these issues are related, I bet this one has to do with some kernel compile options that I selected wrong. This is just annoying because it gives the impression that my computer is unusually slow.

Anyone run into these things before?

qubex · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2003 9:45 pm Post subject:

Yes, the problem being that it can be one of many, many things. Things like wrong chipset loaded, hdparm settings, dma, shared irqs, chipset eccentricities, xfree driver issues, mouse issues, usb bus issues, high processor load, low memory, swap issues, etc. See what I'm getting at?

If you cannot find anything wrong, try updating your kernel to >2.5.67 (if you feel comforable running a dev kernel). There is a new scheduler that REALLY smoothes things out in Xfree. This will only mask the problem though if something else is to blame.

barrowaj · n00b Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 33 Location: Austin, TX

I just recompiled my kernel with gentoo-sources-rc2 and modularized all non-essential parts of the kernel. From what I hear that's the correct way to do it, even if you want those modules running all the time. Supposedly it helps with stability.

But this also fixed the problem of openoffice running unbearably slow when I have folding@home running in the background. Evidently there was some problem with the pre-emption or process scheduling on the r1 release that caused that.

Now everything works smoooooothly. I was surprised that I got everything to work the first time (especially the printer) when I turned all that stuff into modules. I guess I'm getting better at this.

b-llwyd · Posted: Sun May 11, 2003 7:22 am Post subject:

I used to have the very same problem with my mouse (intellieye, optical, usb), and i could solve the problem by unloading the uhci (or usb-uhci) module, and then loading it again. It doesn't happen very often now though (2.4.20-ck6). Maybe once every 20 boot-ups.