I'm running XFCE and Debian stable on a Thinkpad R40 (~ 10 years old), and have
lately faced a whole host of problems following the touchpad's finally giving
out. While I can still move the cursor via the touchpad and track point, all of
the buttons either do not work at all or produce sporadic and at times
seemingly random results.
I'll try and describe: The lower two mouse buttons do not work, and aren't
reported in xev when pressed. The top three do, however, but their function
seems to change constantly. At times the leftmost button will report itself in
xev as "button 1" (left-click), the right as "button 2" (right-click), and the
middle as "button 3" (middle-click). So far so good. At other times, the left
button will be "button 1", the right will be "button 3," and the middle won't
work at all. This seems to change minute-to-minute, and makes it difficult to
use a GUI with any reliability.
What's most frustrating is that all of this switching around seems to severely
confuse XFCE. Alt-tab usually will not work at all, despite both keys being
reported in xev; other times, xev will tell me that "button 1" is working, even
though it obviously has no function on the desktop or in applications.
I'm not interested in getting everything back to full functionality, as it
probably won't work, but I would like to be able to nail the top buttons down
to specific functions and not have them switch so much. If this isn't possible,
I'd like to disable the touchpad and all of the mouse buttons entirely,
preferably via a module blacklisting (i.e. before X is loaded). I haven't yet
tried to plug in a mouse, as I don't have one lying around.
I'd appreciate any help or suggestions, and hope that I've described the
problem sufficiently. Thanks!
