Re: [gentoo-user] How to stop mouse motion

["Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto" <please.no.spam.here@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 18:55 -0200, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
>> Hi. I have a crappy mouse made in China. One of its problems is that
>> the mouse pointer sometimes moves even while the mouse is not moving.
>> Usually this manifests by the pointer "shaking", moving back and
>> forward one or two pixels very fast (it looks like some 5 times per
>> second).  The worst problem caused by this is that the monitor can
>> wake up at seemingly random times.
>>
>> One solution would be to switch off the monitor every time I won't use
>> it for a few minutes, but (AFAIK) this would waste energy and reduce
>> lifetime. I want the DPMS modes of standby, suspend, off.
>>
>> Another solution would be to buy another mouse, but this would cost
>> money and would not teach me the solution (this problem can manifest
>> again in the future, with this or another computer).
>>
>> So I want a way to tell the kernel or X11 to ignore mouse motion.
>> Either to shut down mouse motion completely, or to allow it but to
>> ignore it for the effect considering the computer as idle. I have
>> performed a quick read of kernel code and of the xorg.conf man page
>> but I see no clue.
>>
>> Anybody knows?
>>
> Yes.  What you need to do is write your own mouse driver.  Call it
> 'crappydrv'.  In this driver, you detect events sent by the mouse, but
> then simply ignore them.
I don't know how to write my own driver, and what I want is to
dynamically shut up the mouse at runtime, and free it when I come
back. Or, ideally, just make X ignore mouse movement for idle time
calculations.

But you were probably joking anyway...

-- 
Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds