Ubuntu 12.10 & 12.04.1 LTS mouse freezing (Saitek Cyborg R.A.T.5 Mouse)

Question

I've figured it out: it's the Cyborg mouse. I'll be looking through the questions as I remember seeing something about this.

I'm getting a similar issue to this fellow: https://askubuntu.com/questions/75433/ubuntu-11-04-randomly-freezes-for-over-one-minute

Sometimes it comes back to life after a minute or two only to crash again. Alt-tab works, but it does not display the windows-switching animation. It just switches the focus... sometimes. Ctrl-Alt-T works, thankfully, and the terminal stays responsive long enough for me to get in a "sudo reboot now" and type my password.

I'm running a fresh Wubi install on a separate HDD from my Windows install. 64-bit 12.10 12.04.1 LTS now, with an AMD FX chip, 8GB of RAM, and a Radeon HD 3850. My mouse is a Saitek Cyborg R.A.T.5 Mouse, and my keyboard is a stock Acer one that came with a PC I bought a few years ago.

Solution 1

Okay, so thanks to about six different pages (being a new user, I can't post more than two links, so I've posted the two most useful), I've got this going. By running gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) to edit X11's xorg.conf file, then pasting the following in at the bottom:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Mouse Remap"
    MatchProduct "Saitek Cyborg R.A.T.5 Mouse"
    #May also be "Mad Catz Mad Catz R.A.T.5 Mouse" depending on production date.
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Option "AccelerationProfile" "1"
    Option "ConstantDeceleration" "5"
    Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 0 0 0"
    Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

You should change the MatchProduct field to match your own version of the R.A.T. mouse. You can find it with xinput.

A few things to note if you want to understand what this block of text means are the Option fields. AccelerationProfile 1 sets mouse acceleration off. It's a personal preference thing-- you can omit this line if you like acceleration, or make it a higher number for a few different kinds of acceleration. You can read more about it in the first of the links below.

ConstantDeceleration is also not necessary, but it really helps slow the mouse down so you can use a higher DPS (because why use 1600 when you can use 5600?) without having your mouse fly all over the screen. Play with this number if you don't think it feels right-- higher numbers mean a slower mouse.

ButtonMapping is where the actual fix takes place: you'll notice that where one would expect the numbers 13, 14, and 15, there are 0s. This is because the three mode buttons are mapped to 13, 14, and 15. We want to stop Ubuntu listening to those buttons, so we un-map them with 0s.

ZAxisMapping is to get the back and forward thumb buttons working like they should. I honestly didn't do any reading about this one, I just saw one guy saying it should work, so I tried it and it worked. It's particularly mystifying to me since the back and forward thumb buttons are actually buttons 8 and 9, but if it ain't broke don't fix it, right?

http://www.x.org/archive/current/doc/man/man5/xorg.conf.5.xhtml

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1528982&page=2

Solution 2

This file is self explanatory can be used to configure R.A.T 5 mouse in Linux, Fedora 17 or Ubuntu 12.04 (tested), probably it will work for other models too.

# Filename: 20-cyborgrat5.conf
# Should be added into folder:
# [Fedora] /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
# [Ubuntu] /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/
Section “InputClass”
    Identifier “Mouse Remap”
    MatchProduct “Saitek”
    MatchDevicePath “/dev/input/event*”
    Option “ButtonMapping” “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 0 0 0″
    # CHANGFE THE 8 AFTER 7 BACK INTO A 2 IF IT BREAKS.
EndSection

Comments

[Serrano Pereira]

Instead of editing system file xorg.conf, I would recommend putting that code in a new file rat5-quirks.conf in directory /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/.