For the second time in two days, my mouse just "disappeared" from my desktop system running CentOS 4.1 (yes, I'm using CentOS as a workstation). At the time, I was trying to open the main Gnome menu from the panel, and I think my hand slipped before I released the mouse button. I tried accessing an alternate console (Ctrl-Alt-1) and then coming back to the X11 desktop (Alt-F7) but that didn't fix the problem. Alt-Tab wouldn't cycle through windows, and when I tried to do a xkill from the active xterm window, I got a "Can't grab the mouse" error.
I killed the X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and logged back in, and everything is back to normal. Has anyone else seen this? Any suggestions on how to debug this next time it happens?
To be fair, I should tell you that I am using Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net) to share the mouse and keyboard of the CentOS system with two other systems (my CentOS box is the Synergy server). I've been using Synergy for a long time, and CentOS almost as long, and have never had this problem until this week.
My last yum update was on 9/17 and it did update the xorg-x11 packages. I wonder if this is a bug in the latest release...
Alfred
Try turning off console mouse services.
If you regularly use the console mouse services, so you don't want to turn it off, then next time your mouse goes missing from X11 try Ctrl-Alt-F2 to a console window and restart the console mouse services, then Alt-F7 (or whatever) back to the X session.
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Alfred von Campe -
Bart Schaefer