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
