Mouse scroll does not work

Question

The scroll in my mouse does not work at all in any PC. Looking at the previous questions here, it does appear that is broken.

Is there anyway that I can find out whether it is really broken - run some diagnostic tests (apart from scrolling it up and down and finding that mouse pointer does not move) and verify that it is indeed broken?

Answer 1

Running xev, moving the cursor inside the black square, and scrolling up and down should result in ButtonPress and ButtonRelease events for buttons 4 and 5.

Answer 2

X-Mouse Button Control is Windows software that will show you what your mouse is doing.

Open the software, and click the buttons, or scroll the wheel. The dropdown lists next to each action flash yellow when you do it - for example the dropdown list next to "Wheel Up" will flash yellow when you move the mouse wheel up.

This application also allows you to customise what each action does - I use it to reverse my scroll wheel on my PC so that it is the same as the one in Mac OSX Lion.

Answer 3

I just had a problem with my mouse - and it turned out it was a hardware one (it is one of those Logitech Wireless USB mice, which have a 'smooth scroll' option on the middle button wheel - you press it once, you have 'smooth scroll', press it once more, then you have 'stepped' scroll...) Turns out, my middle wheel was stuck, so I had to press it a couple of times until it 'recovered' - and I used xev (on Ubuntu 10.04) to control this.

To say a couple more words on the mouse under Ubuntu - you can inspect the system log, to see what was logged upon boot, in respect to, say, USB devices - to see if the device is recognized at all. However, this with the "system log" is not necessarily fixed - on Ubuntu 10.04, I simply look in /var/log/messages - but in 11.04, the 'Logitech' string shows in these files:

$ grep --files-with-matches --recursive Logitech /var/log 2>/dev/null 
/var/log/spnavd.log
/var/log/Xorg.0.log
/var/log/Xorg.1.log
/var/log/dmesg.0
/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old
/var/log/dmesg
/var/log/kern.log.1
/var/log/udev

Under 11.04, I guess one way is to grep/search for 'usb' string in /var/log/dmesg - or maybe even easier; again for 'Logitech' string:

$ grep Logitech /var/log/dmesg
[   22.323032] input: Logitech USB Receiver as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.0/input/input7
[   22.323529] generic-usb 0003:046D:C526.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Logitech USB Receiver] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1/input0
[   22.502664] input: Logitech USB Receiver as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.1/input/input8
[   22.509847] generic-usb 0003:046D:C526.0002: input,hiddev0,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Device [Logitech USB Receiver] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1/input1

What you want, is to see which "USB address" the device is connected to - above we see "usb3", so we can basically "cat" to stdout the corresponding usbmon file under /dev (that is, /dev/usbmon3); this should give us the "raw" USB data coming in from the device; since this binary cannot be directly rendered in terminal, we'd pipe it into hexdump to have it formatted:

$ sudo cat /dev/usbmon3 | hexdump -C
00000000  80 6b 14 f1 00 00 00 00  43 01 81 02 03 00 2d 00  |.k......C.....-.|
00000010  4c e0 75 4e 00 00 00 00  41 5a 07 00 00 00 00 00  |L.uN....AZ......|
00000020  08 00 00 00 08 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000030  00 00 ff ff 00 00 00 00  80 6b 14 f1 00 00 00 00  |.........k......|
00000040  53 01 81 02 03 00 2d 3c  4c e0 75 4e 00 00 00 00  |S.....-<L.uN....|
....

Now, when you perform actions on the mouse (move, button press), more data should respectively be shown in terminal (kill this process eventually with Ctrl-C). Note you'd have to use sudo in the command above.

The point is - if in the test above, you get data generated when you move the mouse scroll-wheel up and down; then at least the hardware and the USB driver portion of the chain should be working - if all is working, then those events should propagate to the X system, and be reported by xev as well. (since in my case I didn't see these events, I could then deduce a hardware problem; which, this time, was luckily easily solved with a just couple of presses. Also note - when all works, moving the scroll wheel also generates data in terminal, so you won't be able to scroll the terminal with the scroll wheel :) in that case, revert back temporarily to keyboard arrows scrolling of terminal).