I have been running Linux Mint on my Acer Aspire ES 15 for over a year and have have been very pleased with it so far. However, recently my usb mouse became intermittent and now seems to have stopped working completely. I have also tried a wireless mouse but this doesn't work either. I suspect a software fault; can you help please? I have some technical knowledge but am not highly knowledgeable in Linux.

A wired mouse is probably more reliable. Try I get

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Did you try cleaning out the mouse? They can get full of dust. Does the mouse work on a different computer?

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My mouse is still not working. I tried <lsusb | grep -i mouse> and got nothing back, only the $ prompt. I don't know what to do next. My usb mouse which I was working with seems to have developed a wiring fault (light flashes on/off when I wiggle the wire) so I've changed over to an Acer wireless mouse which worked when I used a couple of weeks ago but that doesn't work either. Perhaps the mouse driver has failed; how do I correct this? Getting desperate!

TonyWinn

Staying with the Acer wireless mouse - I assume it uses a USB receiver? If so, show us
You can also run
then unplug the receiver dongle and plug it back in again. What is captured in the dmesg output?

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BTW, have you tried using alternative USB ports?

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The first thing to do is to determine for certain whether this a hardware or software problem. Gut instinct is not a valid test.

Get another mouse, one that you know works, and test it; maybe you could borrow one from a friend. That will tell you conclusively whether this is a hardware or software problem. For a further test, you could boot to a Live CD of something and test the mouse with it.

If the mouse is broken/worn out, no amount of mucking with software will fix it.

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Thank you all for your help.

I carried out the checks you suggested. I also borrowed my wife's trackerball which worked perfectly! I then rebooted on the original live CD (linux Mint 18 cinnamon 64bit) and the wireless mouse also worked perfectly. After removing the CD and rebooting the computer the wireless mouse worked!! I'm don't at present know how to produce the Terminal Screen shots you sent, nor how to transfer them into this type of messaging. Am I pushing things a bit by asking for help here as well (perhaps I should start a new string for this)?

Anyway, the mouse problem seems to be solved and I am extremely grateful for all your help; thanks again

TonyWinn

No need for screenshots, just select the text in the terminal(not all terminals do this but Mint does) right-click and select copy. Than headed over here and and paste it here. if you can please use code tags

[CODE]
code here
[forward-slashCODE]

Replace forward-slash with /.

Hope this helps

Glad you got it working.

It never hurts to try a reboot!