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KoRnKloWn
Asked: 2011-08-04 11:46:56 +0800 CST

USB mouse cuts out on battery power

  • 772

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit laptop, and I have a Microsoft mouse. When I'm on the battery power the mouse cuts in and out, I have full battery power so it's not because of low power. It never does this in Windows, and in the past when I ran Karmic it never did this either, only when I reinstalled Ubuntu with Natty. As soon as I plug in the power it works perfectly fine.

mouse

6 Answers

  1. This behaviour is caused by laptop-mode-tools. While it's true that removing it completely solves the "problem", you may still want to keep the package on your system.

    In order to disable the usb autosuspend feature of laptop-mode-tools for your mouse, you can insert your mouse's USBID (obtainable through lsusb) in

    /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/usb-autosuspend.conf

    on the line

    AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST="your-usb-id"

    where your-usb-id is of the format 093a:2510 (this is my mouse). If AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST is already there, simply add the necessary USBID (note this will work only if AUTOSUSPEND_USE_WHITELIST is set to 0).

    Finally, reload laptop-mode-tools by executing

    # service laptop-mode reload

    or

    $ sudo service laptop-mode reload
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  2. Make sure you don't have the laptop-mode-tools or powertop packages installed. If you do, uninstall them by running 

    sudo apt-get remove --purge laptop-mode-tools powertop && apt-get autoremove

    This solved the issue for me on Mint 13 on an Alienware M14x R2.

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  3. Best Answer

    I should note that after 11.10 that problem no longer existed for me. So the answer to this problem is just update! :D

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  4. It seems like your computer is set to disable USB when iddle as a power saving measure.

    This is usually suggested by powertop, but it's a very bad idea if you are using a USB mouse. This command fixes it temporally:

    echo -1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/devices/yourmouse/../power/autosuspend

    You need to substitute yourmouse for your mouse bus and device number, you can usually find it with:

    lsusb

    Unluckily this will work only until whatever the program that have changed the setting kicks on again: either at boot time, when you disconnect your computer from electricity, or whatever. You need to discover what package is changing it to resolve the issue.

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  5. I had a similar problem and I solved it by disabling pm-powersave with

        # pm-powersave false

    Then I rebooted my laptop and everything was just fine. I don't know, however, the other implications of this action.

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  6. Using Ubuntu Mate 15.10 I solved this with one terminal command ..

    sudo tlp ac

    it looks like tlp (power manager) blocks the usb mouse to save power

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