Brasi, my old Dell laptop, is starting to show signs of old age.
Obviously, this was far from a high-end machine when I bought it (second handed) back in 2006, and it was never expected to run extremely smooth or fast. But lately, one problem has been resurfacing over and over again, which seriously hinders it from operating normally:
Sometimes the mouse cursor just spears of to any given corner of the screen, and remains ’stuck’ there, leaving me with a very dysfunctional graphical environment.
I’m pretty sure this is a hardware problem, caused by plain old age, and not a software one, since I’ve noticed this little quirk happened on several installs, of several different distributions.
Up to now, the solution has been pretty simple; Either I wait for a while until the laptop’s little tantrum is over. Or, using my most sophisticated mechanical skills, I give it a good knock. However, it has aggravated up to a point that waiting just takes too long and hitting it just causes the cursor to “flee” to another corner of the screen, still remaining ’stuck’.
So now the situation calls for a more thorough solution, which leaves me not depending that much on the ability of using the mouse. In other words, I need to specify enough keybinds to allow me “do” everything I used to “do” with the mouse. Luckily, this can easily be set up in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, the main configuration file of my favorite window manager, Openbox.
Nonetheless, this is not what I’ve done (yet).
