From time to time (most likely once a day) Xfce behaves really strange. From some point on it doesn't accept mouse clicks outside the active window anymore. In fact this means not the whole window but the active part of it. The result is that you cannot close the active window by clicking the close button of the title bar and you cannot click into any other window or the desktop, nor the panel. Sometimes it helpes to switch workspaces by keyboard and switch back again. But after one or two clicks the same behavior comes back. To my surprise I found this issue in Cinnamon two - I don't know which parts Xfce and Cinnamon share - just a experience... I know that my information here is not very much - please help me to provide you with log files and so on. For now this is a real problem for me as productive work cannot really be done on my machine now. Interestingly the issue came up this week for the first time while it did not appear the week before (when I installed Mint 13 Xfce). But this week I had the problem every day - so that I thought you should know about it. Best regards, Lucas
I think I've found an interesting phenomenon on this: It seems as there's no problem as long as I do not switch on my keyboards backlight. When switching it on with the little key button in the top right corner of the keyboard Xfce seems to recognize this as a "right click" - what I mean is that a context menu appears then. From this moment on the mouse clicks are locked to the active window as described above. By again using the light key button (which then changes the colour of the backlight) a new context menu will open and the mouse clicks seem to be locked to the window the cursor was above when doing so. For your information: My keyboard is a Medion MD86480 - you can see a picture here: http://www.medion.com/de/electronics/prod/MEDION®+USB+Gaming+Tastatur+X81005+(MD+85954)/20047320A1?search=md86480&y=0&x=0#searchResult (picture shows a very similar model) I'm very surprised that the colour changing key is recognized by the PC at all - more likely I'm surprised that the keyboard sends any signal when this key is pressed...
Correction: I found out that switching the workplace as well as pressing the light key button on my keyboard both do not allow mouse clicks reliably. Sometimes it helps and one or two mouse clicks are possible again (outside the active window area) and sometimes nothing happens. The light key button does also not always trigger a context menu...
Hi Lucas, Sorry this bug report has gone ignored. You are most likely experiencing an issue with your keyboard driver or keyboard configuration rather than Xfce or Cinnamon. It is common on old keyboards to have a "Contextual Menu" button because in the old days some mice had only one button. It seems your keyboard believes your backlight key to be the "Contextual Menu" key. What you can do from there is report the problem to your distribution so they can find whether it is a configuration mistake on their behalf or a bug in an upstream package that causes the issue. I am not sure whether the correct upstream is the Linux kernel or the X.org Foundation so I advise you ask your distribution's support team first. This report should be closed as invalid.
Thanks for your reply. I've stopped using the backlight switsching key on my keyboard and since then I didn't have that problem anymore. In fact I'm blaming the keyboard, because in my opinion it should just not send any signal to the PC when changing the backlight colour. I've now changed the colour of the backlight to red permanently (which is much mor eye friendly) by changing the internal connections of the keyboard. Best regards, Lucas
Thanks Lucas. You could use xev to check if switching lights does cause sending events, albeit there are a few events that even xev might not see. Ultimately only the kernel can tell. If you believe as well that the problem was caused by the keyboard rather than Xfce, could you please change the bug status to RESOLVED -> INVALID? Thanks.
Sorry, I didn't know that I am authorised to do this - I'm not really familliar with bug reporting systems ;)