[SOLVED] Extra Button in GNOME Status Menu

Question

Hello,
I'm going to have to apologize right off the bat for this rather vague question, but I really don't have much to go on (yet). I've done a lot of Googling to try to figure this out but nothing has turned up so far.
Now that that's out of the way, here's the problem:
An extra button has shown up in my GNOME status menu. The image is a link to a (slightly) higher quality version. The button doesn't seem to do anything, except when I click it the icon changes to this:
A second click restores the first icon, and the cycle repeats. I'm running GNOME 3.14, and the icon showed up a couple weeks back while I was having a DE install-fest and trying out Cinnamon and KDE. As far as I can tell, it showed up around the time I set those up, but that could also just be a coincidence. Now that that adventure is through, Cinnamon and KDE have been uninstalled and I've done my best to rm any remaining config files. My second Arch machine has no such button (and has only ever run GNOME). Honestly, it doesn't make any practical difference, so I ignored it at first, but its unexplained existence has come to disturb me.
I've tried searching for others with a similar problem, looked at GNOME extentions that themselves add a button (such as https://github.com/arelange/gnome-shell … ate-status), and perused through the GNOME-shell source code in an attempt familarize myself with what was going on. I'm rather inexperienced with that sort of programming, so my endeavor was not as insightful as I had hoped. As a final act of desperation, I ran
pacman -S gnome
but of course, with no success. If anyone could point me in the right direction or offer suggestions, it would be very appreciated!
Last edited by threeofsix (2014-11-02 05:04:57)

Answer 1

Ahh, yes, I think you are right. In fact, my relatively old and bulky Acer 5742 does have an accelerometer (presumably for HDD shock protection?):
$ cat /proc/bus/input/devices
I: Bus=0019 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
N: Name="Acer BMA150 accelerometer"
P: Phys=wmi/input1
S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input13
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=event11 js0
B: PROP=0
B: EV=9
B: ABS=7
I checked and the bma150 module wasn't loaded, so I went ahead and loaded it and started waiving my 5.7lb laptop around like a madman. No screen rotation, and I'm not sure how to read the raw input from the device, but I'm sure there are a plethora of reasons GNOME might detect an accelerometer and put a button there even if it isn't designed for this sort of input or properly configured or supported. If that's the case, there's no need to figure out how to get rid of the button, but I am curious if other people have similar experiences or perhaps the opposite (you can see an accelerometer but no button) just for some level of certainty this is the correct explanation. For starters, my other machine that does not have the button also does not have an accelerometer listed in /proc/bus/input/devices.