Logitech G9 randoms double-clicks and (no) holding clicks

Message

marco.difresco · Post by **marco.difresco** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:25 pm

Hi all,
a couple of weeks ago I did a clean re-install of Gentoo on my computer (to clear some leftover of heavy experimentation I did over the past months) and since then I am having issues with my Logitech G9 mouse.

The 2 problems I have are:
1) often the single clicks are interpreted as double clicks (and therefore activating things I merely wanted to select);
2) when I try to drag things the system randomly stop perceiving the holding of the mouse and therefore it drops the item on the current position of the mouse (and sometime it take the initial click-and-holding as the mentioned double click).

Do you have any suggestion on how I can debug and track the source of the issue?

Thanks in advance.

Bones McCracker · Post by **Bones McCracker** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:01 am

I starting having the same problem a couple of weeks ago (with a wireless Logitech Performance MX mouse).

I haven't notice any "double-click" problem, but when I click-drag, it lets go after a random time (making almost impossible to reliably select large amounts of text with the mouse or do any "dragging" operations).

AaronPPC · Post by **AaronPPC** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:48 am

In my experience, this points to a hardware problem. You might be able to clean the mouse button by tapping on it several times a little harder than you normally would.

If that doesn't fix it, then the button is going bad and you have a new mouse in your future.

Bones McCracker · Post by **Bones McCracker** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 7:35 am

Then why does it work perfectly on other computers?

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 10:38 am

I've had this problem, solved by opening up the mouse (screws are under the teflon pads, under the mouse) and removing dust from the button contacts.

FWIW, I've not heard of a relevant Linux software bug.

Bones McCracker · Post by **Bones McCracker** » Mon Feb 25, 2013 6:29 am

I'll bet it's my god-damned cat, then. He's always rubbing his head on that mouse.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Mon Feb 25, 2013 7:28 am

I have an el-cheap mouse with 5 buttons on it. It started multi clicking after several months of use. I at first "fixed" the problem by desoldering and swapping the lesser used switches and put them into button 1 and 2 positions that are by far used more than any other buttons :D

However after several, several swaps I ran out of good buttons. At this point I had to disassemble the actual switch and put some contact cleaner, and got a few more months of use out of it.

I think it's about time that I need to do this again, it started double clicking randomly again.

marco.difresco · Post by **marco.difresco** » Mon Feb 25, 2013 6:19 pm

As soon as I can, I'll try to open it and clean it.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll let you know.

marco.difresco · Post by **marco.difresco** » Tue Feb 26, 2013 10:15 pm

marco.difresco wrote:As soon as I can, I'll try to open it and clean it.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll let you know.

I tried to clean it, but after less than three hours it started to show the problems again.

So it may indeed be an hardware problem (after all when I opened it there wasn't much of dust anyway); since I am not confident in soldering and swapping components, I think it would be better if I directly buy a new mouse.

Do you have any recommendation? I think I will return to a standard 2 bottoms + wheel since I am more a keyboard person anyway, but I am still looking for an high precision and very durable mouse.

Thank you very much.

P.S.: since I am using it on a desktop computer and I don't mind the cables on the back of the desk and I still have a free back USB port (plus the one that will free up when I will decommission the G9) and all 4 front USB port free, I think it will be more convenient to have a corded mouse even if it is to merely avoid the annoyance to have to change the batteries.

Bones McCracker · Post by **Bones McCracker** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 7:21 am

AaronPPC wrote:In my experience, this points to a hardware problem. You might be able to clean the mouse button by tapping on it several times a little harder than you normally would.

If that doesn't fix it, then the button is going bad and you have a new mouse in your future.

I'm really glad you mentioned this. At first I dismissed it, because it seemed to have started suddenly and been consistent. But then I noticed it wasn't happening the other day.

After thinking about it for a few seconds, I realized I was being unusually gentle with the mouse. Since then I've verified it. It works fine as long as I'm not pressing too hard on the button. So my problem is almost certainly with the contacts. Thank you.

marco.difresco · Post by **marco.difresco** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 10:21 am

Any idea about the Logitech Gaming Mouse G300?
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/gaming-mouse-g300

As I mentioned I could be doing just fine with just a regular 2 buttons + wheel, but for € 29.90 (on the Italian Logitech web site) it may be nice to have some extra button, except that I found the following issue on the web:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... light=g300
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/887082

The problem with the above issue is that the last comments are almost a year old and some of those mention that the mouse works on other distros. It would be nice to know how if mouse fully works now and especially under Gentoo; € 29.90 may not seems much waste of money, but over the years I have already spent a lot of money on hardware that either doesn't work under Linux (HT Omega Claro II*, various TV cards, etc.) or works with limited features (on the Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard I merely use the monitor to show some system stat on cpu/mem usage, temp and main fan speed, but for the rest I am limited on using it as a plain keyboard) therefore if it doesn't fully work, I would be better off with a plain Logitech Mouse M90 that costs € 7.99.

* this page http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-user@l ... 29284.html gives me hopes for the future.

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 11:12 am

marco.difresco wrote:Logitech Gaming Mouse G300

According to Arch wiki it's a simple fix, to disable its "keyboard" component.

Edit: Looks like it was fixed in xf86-input-evdev a year ago.

marco.difresco · Post by **marco.difresco** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 11:54 am

PaulBredbury wrote:
marco.difresco wrote:Logitech Gaming Mouse G300
Looks like it was fixed in xf86-input-evdev a year ago.

Thanks for the info.

Unless there are other recommendations, I'll probably go for that.

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 2:03 pm

This is known as "contact bounce".
Difficult to overcome once it starts.
Gerard.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 3:39 pm

Contact bounce is one thing, it definitely is a problem in all switches. However I don't know about how USB HID works, it's possible that contact bounce is dealt with by the PC versus by the mouse itself... I was hoping bounce is dealt with by the mouse versus the PC mouse driver...

Anyone know the details? That would be interesting if the USB protocol is "fast" enough to pass along bounce info, but I kind of doubt it because of the nature of USB where the host controller needs to poll the mouse to get data (??!).