Yesterday, and again today, I had to unplug my mouse and then plug it back in before the OS recognized it. It’s a bog standard mouse, not some fancy Logitec with 23 buttons. It’s a plain old USB mouse with no extra buttons of any kind.
This is on bare metal, not in a VM.
So, what’s next? Do I do all that hardinfo stuff and ‘register’ the hardware used and then file a bug?
Is it actually worth filing a bug?
This can be replicated. If I boot it a second time (live instance), I again must disconnect my mouse before it is recognized.
Could it be possible that the hardware, either the mouse itself or the USB port, are going bad? Can you consistently reproduce it every single time across all the USB ports? This is kernel-level stuff, and honestly, given the amount of devices covered in the kernel, I’d be shocked by that.
The behavior is the same on 6 USB ports. The behavior is also true with a different mouse (only checked on one port). The behavior does NOT appear when using a Live LMDE USB that I had handy to check with.
It consistently requires unplugging the mouse and plugging it back in.
I think I’ll wait and see if it continues over the next few builds. If it does, I’ll go ahead and document it more clearly and post the bug.
Does that sound like a reasonable response to this?
That’s the sort of scientific approach to things that is essential in testing and development, so great work.
You also may want to check this with other Ubuntu flavors. Xubuntu is probably the next lightest behind us, so you might want to start there. Again, with my thinking this is kernel-level, it should be consistent.
Now comes the hard part: figuring out where the problem is. There are logs in /var/log, particularly dmesg, syslog, and Xorg.0.log, that should be rifled through to see if any errors stand out.
LOL I’m a retired mathematician. Shh! Don’t tell anyone - or they’ll expect me to do math!
I’ll give one of the others a try tomorrow. I’ll download it tonight and it’ll be ready for me tomorrow. This machine has adequate horsepower to run any official Ubuntu flavor in an acceptable manner.
Lemme double check that…
Intel(R) Core™ i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz
and
Mem: 15912
So, an i5 with 16 GB of RAM. It’s not nearly as new as my main computers, but it’s still modern enough to run anything Ubuntu offers.
I’ll download an ISO and check the results in the morning. Thanks again for holding my hand through this!
I’ll provide the following, but it’s likely of little value, and possibly just red herring
I have had trouble with mice, especially on one box which acts as you describe (requiring me to remove it, then re-plug in, sometimes often), but others too.
I’ve concluded my mice issues are hardware; PSU on the boxes getting old, or my use of KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switches drawing added power for its own operation making my old PSUs struggle.
I compare the issue with a different OS; if it’s a live Lubuntu system, I can compare with a another GNU/Linux running live.
You mention LMDE so I would also compare Lubuntu on live so it’s closest to how LMDE is operating, as if it’s PSU related (as I suspect some of mine are), the power used by a disk (esp. spinning rust drive motors) operating will likely differ to that used by thumb-drive.
Myself, I try and do comparisons with other OSes to confirm it’s a Lubuntu issue before filing a bug, if I’ve run out of time (for the day/session) and want to record my thoughts, I may file the bug and immediately change it’s status to “Incomplete” (as in I plan to do more on it). Filing bugs and recording on the QA-tracker makes it easier for you to track (when it occurred, how often etc), the down-side is it’ll appear on other testers [iso.qa]screens too (with suggestion for them to test for it). In the end you should do what you consider is best.
Thanks! I’ll not only do more comprehensive testing, I’ll check on yet another set of hardware just to be sure. I don’t want to file frivolous bugs and waste time. After all, that kinda defeats my purpose for doing this in the first place. The goal is to be beneficial to the project!
So far, so good. Of course, I’m only two days into it - but they’ve been pretty enjoyable. It’s taking more of my time than I’d anticipated - but that’s okay. I have priorities, but it is not infringing on them. After all, it’s a pandemic. 'Snot like I’m going out to visit people!
What I’m doing is I’m grabbing Xubuntu’s testing ISO and I’ll test that against the Lubuntu ISO tomorrow. Then, I’ll check on different hardware. I’d be surprised if any of this hardware is failing, but it could be. The computer has largely just sat there and done nothing since I bought it. I don’t even recall why I bought it. I think I bought it to put it out in the garage and it just never got there and I used a laptop instead.
Though time does kill hardware, so it could be. I did test all the ports. I’ll confirm it by checking against alternative hardware and with at least a couple of other distros.
Not to continue the tangents, but I can’t help it. I was in school for biology and loved math so much, I considered changing my major. And then I tried to crack open one of the journals at the math library. I realized it would take me years just to understand the abstracts, let alone get the rest of the article, and decided against it. Admittedly, that’s research-level math, which is a whole different level compared to, say, doing statistics, but I wasn’t too interested in that.
I started out my first four years as an EE major with a minor in Pure Math. I got accepted into the grad program as an Applied Maths grad student. Alas, I had no funding and ended up enlisting into the military for a second time to save money. Then, I returned as a grad student and ended up modeling traffic.
I love mathematics. It’s both a language and a philosophy. Sadly, most folks aren’t given the chance to appreciate it - because of the way it is taught. It’s taught by rote, rather than as a language and using that language to evaluate statements for truth (as decided by the philosophy).
Math didn’t come easy to me. In fact, I despised it in high school. (Technically, I went to a fancy prep school.) I was struggling to find the area of a right triangle when the instructor said, “You know, you can just turn it into a square, find the area, and divide that by half.” It was at that point that I realized mathematics was a language and that things could be expressed in many ways.
I still hated math. I actually took the minor on because I knew I’d need to improve my math to be any good as an EE. I ended up modeling traffic because I was a poor grad student and Massachusetts was willing to give me their accumulated data for the low price of nothing. The rest is, shall we say, history.
In 2007, our economy imploded. The government announced that they’d be investing billions in the highway infrastructure. My company became very valuable overnight and I was offered an absurd sum of money to sell it. I chose to do so and have been retired ever since.
And, well, that’s about it. That’s how I got to here. I just got really lucky and was in the right place at the right time.
As you can see, I do not mind digression! All work and no play makes for a dull thread. Besides, you’re probably a mod! It’s not like you’re going to ban yourself!
You mention, as I understand it, bug 1905322 occurring in the QA test session.
I’d list it in the bugs section (but not critical-bugs), as that will cause the date/ISO it occurred to be linked with that launchpad bug report, letting anyone looking see how often it’s reported occurring. I’d for sure still pass the test like you did.
My 2c anyway; I’m not a product manager that gets the emails on these reports… (thats Dan, Walter, …)
I’ll attend to it. It has been linked in the past, so I wasn’t sure if I should just keep listing it if it hadn’t actually changed. The bug has existed since I first noticed it - and it happens on real hardware and not just in a VM.
I haven’t had time/motivation to test it on a different distro. Basically, open up all the LibreOffice stuff and leave it open. Then, in LibreOffice Writer, select a template and click okay (or maybe continue, whatever it says) and it crashes immediately.
I’m also suffering from a flaky internet connection for about the past 24 hours. It took like four tries just to get it to save - but it’s updated with the bug now listed in the bug spot. Thanks for letting me know.
I did notice that the status on that bug has changed to ‘incomplete’. I have no idea what that means, but at least I know someone has looked at it.
I figured I’d get an update in email if someone had added anything or asked for anything. I got no such emails. Now I know to check 'em manually. Again, that’s for tomorrow.
You should get an email; launchpad will send one to whatever email you have setup (@ outlook it appears to me), but it may not have been sent/arrived yet (many notices are cron job scanned, thus aren’t instant)
It may have been filtered to spam but I skimmed over them before emptying them out today.
Ah well… If I catch one, I’ll filter it to go to a special testing folder. I ain’t scared! (I get hundreds of emails per week. Hundreds… Just to that one account.)
And, yeah, it has me listed as ‘uninvolved’ as I presumably made some error while signing up. The email is actually that (at)outlook.com. If you subscribe to the mailing lists, you’ve probably seen me a few times. The records tell me that I’ve been subscribed since 2015.
I used this site’s bookmark/reminder feature to remind me to update the bug with the info they wanted! It works.
I also got some sort of award for people visiting the site to see one of my posts 25 times. Amusingly, it was me telling people how to not use snaps for Google Chrome.
With the pandemic, I have no holiday duties today. Sweet!
I would also compare Lubuntu on live so it’s closest to how LMDE is operating, as if it’s PSU related (as I suspect some of mine are), the power used by a disk (esp. spinning rust drive motors) operating will likely differ to that used by thumb-drive.
