Weird keyboard/mouse I/O bug

Hullo there,
I’m using KDE 5. I have a cheap Logitech USB mouse and keyboard. Sometimes (about 30% of the time) my key presses and clicks are wrongly interpreted. For example, a left click is interpreted as a double click resulting in a window being maximised/minimised when I intended to move it. Another example is the up and down arrows on the keyboard being interpreted as pageup and pagedown. Also, I press SHIFT and sometimes it thinks I pressed CTRL.
It is so annoying and is making my desktop almost unusable. Any ideas?
 
I don’t think I have another to hand. I’m fairly sure it’s an X/kde problem as the keyboard behaves normally till I type “startx”.
 
I have a Logitech USB mouse which works fine with kde 5, but I kept getting moused errors reported on the main console and in dmesg. Then I removed the moused_enable="YES" line from /etc/rc.conf, at the suggestion of someone here, and now all is well. Might not be related to your problem but might be worth a look.
 
Thanks Vull I will investigate.
Anyone have any other suggestions? I’m thinking seriously of reinstalling KDE or even the OS itself...
 
For me that sound more like a hardware problem, a contact e.g. on your keyboard that does not release at times or the like.
I could also imagine an accessibility feature that gets turned on/off by a certain action. Just a guess though.
 
It’s bizarre. Both peripherals worked fine on my Ubuntu Thinkpad, and now I can’t even reproduce the problem on FreeBSD. Last night it was sending random characters to the terminal emulator, deleting characters at random. Today it’s behaving impeccably. I don’t think it’s a hardware problem as why would two separate USB devices malfunction in the same way simultaneously?
Well thanks for your help - I’ll post here again if the problem comes back.
 
A faulty PSU, which does not provide 5V within the allowed specs, can in theory make all usb devices at once, go nuts.
Speaking from own experience. It showed because my usb soundcard wouldn't play anymore.
Grab your multimeter if you got one ;)
 
Thanks k.jacker, I would never have thought of that. I don't have a multimeter unfortunately - I'm strictly a software cat. Guess I'll have to hope the problem doesn't come back.
 
Okay so the computer is f***ed. It’s now spitting out messages like (this is from memory) “SCSI bad/illegal request” and “check device condition” and “unrecoverable/unretryable error”.
Could the power supply affect the hard disk behaviour too or is it more likely the actual disk is failing?
I’m really angry - although this computer is about 6 years old, I’ve only actually used it for about six months out of that time, so this shouldn’t be happening. Don’t buy from CCL Computers in the UK!! :mad::rude:
 
Could the power supply affect the hard disk behaviour too or is it more likely the actual disk is failing?
I doubt that. You should check that the cables sit tight on the hard drive and motherboard. If you are lucky, it's just a loose cable.
In case the harddrive IS as old as the computer, then it's about time to fail.

Such old disks shouldn't be shipped with used computers, and I would talk to CCL Computer. Could be, harddisks are excluded from warranty but that's just a guess. Anyway they shouldn't have shipped the computer with with a new(er) disk in the first place.
I would call that a fraud, so it's on them. I would tell them you are not accepting anything else then a new disk, but that you are willing to connect it yourself, so that the computer doesn't need to be shipped.
 
Oh, you misunderstood... sorry if I wasn’t very clear... I didn’t mean “someone else was using it for the other 5 and a half years”. I meant “I bought it new but just didn’t use it much”.. so I don’t think it’d be covered by warranty anymore.
But yes I will open it up and have a look. Thanks for replying!
And sorry for blaming FreeBSD if there are any contributors reading this...
 
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