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Microsoft wireless mouse stopped working on Linux

Posted October 18th, 2007 in Hardware & Gadgets and Linux/Unix/BSD (Updated October 18th, 2007)

Yesterday while I was doing some work in Adobe Photoshop in a VMWare virtual machine on my Linux KDE desktop, my Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse just suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason. At first I thought VMWare had done something funny with mouse capture so I jumped out of the virtual machine but it still wasn't working. Plugging a regular mouse with a cord into a USB port worked just fine, but the wireless mouse refused to work.

I tried the obvious which is first to press the connect buttons on both the base unit and the mouse itself, but that did nothing. The red optical light on the bottom of the mouse was lit up so I assumed the batteries were running OK. (Yes, it turned out to be a battery issue, but read on for the full story).

The odd thing is that the system log was reporting the mouse as being present, yet moving it around and clicking the buttons did nothing. When I pulled the USB cable out for the base unit I got a regular syslog message as follows:

Oct 18 09:39:28 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: USB disconnect, address 5

And when I plugged it back in again, I got the usual stream of messages telling me about the USB mouse device:

Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 7
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: new device found, idVendor=045e, idProduct=00e1
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: new device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: Product: Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 1.00
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: Manufacturer: Microsoft
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: usb 2-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: input: Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 1.00 as /class/input/input8
Oct 18 09:39:30 desktop kernel: input: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 1.00] on usb-0000:00:0a.0-4

And even looking in Yast under the hardware information applet would show the mouse:

I did the obvious things: restart X; restart the computer; and even tried messing around with the xorg configuration file to see if changing the device the mouse used would make a difference. But nothing worked.

I had recently upgraded from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 and have had all sorts of issues with various pieces of software from doing this, so wondered if maybe SUSE had decided to not like the mouse anymore. Hey, it is a Microsoft mouse after all! So I plugged it into a Windows machine I have here in my office. And guess what, it didn't work in that machine either.

So obviously it wasn't specifically a SUSE or Linux issue. The penny finally dropped that maybe there was a problem with the batteries, so I went and fetched some spare batteries and tried them out. The mouse would now work on the Windows machine. Plugged it back into the Linux machine, and it worked. Sigh... Ah well, a lesson learnt for next time.