[SOLVED] Mouse Acting Up When Using Cinnamon In Non-Root Accounts

Question

I have recently installed Arch linux on my computer, alongside Ubuntu and Windows. I installed cinnamon and xorg from the official repositories, and was happy with the experience. However, I wanted to transition from a root account to a normal user account, because certain software (e.g. Chrome) refuses to run under root. So, I created my user, home directory, and password, and was able to login. I copied my .xinitrc from my root home directory to my normal user accounts' home directory. The contents were this:
exec gnome-session-cinnamon
So, I type startx on the command line, expect everything to work normally, and I find that my mouse is not working properly:
1. I am unable to drag windows around
2. Applications with a scroll bar automatically scroll down to the bottom of page, and you can't scroll back up again
3. I cannot click anything on the sidebar of the cinnamon menu (which contains things like logoff and shutdown, so I had to kill the x server)
However, when logged in on root, none of this happens. At first, I thought this problem was due to me using a display manager (I used gdm and slim). This, however, is not the case. There isn't much out there on the internet for the problem I have, and I assume that this doesn't happen very often. What I did find, however, was to install the following packages:
sudo pacman -S xf86-input-evdev
sudo pacman -S xf86-input-mouse
The problem was still not fixed. I do not have an xorg.conf, but I do have a 50-vmmouse.conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d (I don't know if that's helpful, though):
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier    "vmmouse"
    MatchIsPointer    "on"
    MatchTag    "vmmouse"
    Driver        "vmmouse"
EndSection
Edit: I have a (I think) slightly more useful file: 10-evdev.conf in the same directory:
# Catch-all evdev loader for udev-based systems
# We don't simply match on any device since that also adds accelerometers
# and other devices that we don't really want to use. The list below
# matches everything but joysticks.
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev pointer catchall"
        MatchIsPointer "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "evdev"
EndSection
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev keyboard catchall"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "evdev"
EndSection
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "evdev"
EndSection
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev tablet catchall"
        MatchIsTablet "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "evdev"
EndSection
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev touchscreen catchall"
        MatchIsTouchscreen "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "evdev"
EndSection
Last edited by iandun (2013-07-26 13:42:05)

Answer 1

I have fixed it! After my mouse started automatically moving to the left side of the screen, even when logged in as root, I thought I would have to go back to Ubuntu, but I was able to read another forum thread about someone who was having the same issue (about the mouse moving left), and said that when he unplugged his joystick, everything worked. I realized that I had a joystick, so I unplugged mine and now everything is working like a charm!