JD's Linux Love

Mouse problem?

Having problems with a stuttery or even frozen mouse when playing Linux games like Doom, OpenArena or Teeworlds? Or a non-functioning mouse in your precious DosBOX games? Try setting an environment variable in your .bashrc file:

$ cat >> ~/.bashrc
# Set this to fix mouse problems in Linux & DosBOX games
export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0
^D
$ source ~/.bashrc
$ dosbox -conf master_of_magic.conf

Voilà, it should work! After digging deep into my Google-fu, I found that “DGA” stands for “Direct Graphics Architecture”, an XFree86 proposal for better dealing with fullscreen graphics. I guess it proposes some kind of hardware rendering for the mouse and other lowlevel things, but it looks like the latest X.org 1.9 driver broke things. My DosBOX games were working just fine and then the mouse stopped working. Setting SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE means to don’t use the “DGA” mouse and all of a sudden, my mouse was working again.

Hopefully, this is something that a later revision of the X driver will address, as I didn’t used to have this problem.