In my last post I upgraded to the 2.6.22 kernel to get the nvidia closed source driver to work. Since then the behaviour of the mouse has been very weird:

• Clicks register as double-clicks
• Can’t access menus in Firefox/Iceweseal using the mouse
• Selecting icons on the desktop is difficult, more than one gets selected.
• Can’t click on items in the top Panel, but can on the lower panel
• Clicking on a Window’s border causes it maximise then return to it’s former size

Bizarre, and annoying! Much googling has turned up almost nought, except for this bug report:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=427406

Found via DebianHelp

I’ll try upgrading to Metacity 2.20.0-1 from Unstable:

apt-get install -t unstable metacity

And of course that doesn’t help!

In my xorg.conf, I’ve 2 mice configured:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
# Option “Protocol” “PS/2”
Option “Protocol” “ImPS/2”
# Option “Emulate3Buttons” “true”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ImPS/2”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5”
EndSection

This is in case my USB mouse craps out and I need to plugin an old PS/2 mouse. This has worked fine for at least a few years, but I suspect the 2.6.22 kernel, or the nvidia driver is getting confused by this. I commented out the “Configure Mouse” section, and that didn’t make a difference.

Switching to the Opensource Nvidia driver (nv) didn’t do it. So it makes me think it’s a kernel specific problem.

Going back to 2.6.18-4 kernel and the nv driver (as I can’t get the Debian packaged nvidia driver to work with 2.6.18). Same behaviour there, which means it’s not the nvidia driver or the kernel so it must be Xorg! And after some googling found this recent bug report:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=443503

I sent a couple e-mail to the bug report, with no reply. So, I downgraded to Xorg from testing and had to manually install xserver-xorg-core_2%3a1.3.0.0.dfsg-12_i386.deb . Which cause nvidia-glx to be removed:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nvidia-glx: Depends: xserver-xorg-core (>= 2:1.4) but 2:1.3.0.0.dfsg-12 is installed.

Getting this error message after you’ve compiled the nvidia video module and try to load it:

FATAL: modpost: GPL-incompatible module nvidia.ko uses GPL-only symbol ‘paravirt_ops’

This happens because paravirtualisation is enabled in these kernels, and causes the kernel to only allow GPL modules to build:

What happens is that when paravirtualization support is turned on many functions in the kernel call implicitly paravirt_ops – function marked as GPL only. One of these functions is udelay – function that makes a program stay idle for some period of time. And the nvidia driver uses udelay (I can’t imagine a driver that won’t use udelay somehow) and therefore you can not compile the driver normally.

This only happens if your running a 2.6.20 or 2.6.21 kernel on Debian. The quick fix (at least for me) is to upgrade to a 2.6.22 kernel and make sure you’ve upgraded nvidia-glx also. Alternatively, you can patch your kernel, see here for more detail and for links to patched verisons of the nvidia driver:
http://grizach.sc18.info/nvpatch/