Unity does not accept mouse clicks

Intriguingly, if I am in the middle of an alt-tab, it will accept clicks. So if I press alt-tab, then keep holding alt, I can interact with unity like normal [1] until I let go of alt. Then it stops accepting clicks again.

[1] Well, mostly normal. Indicators will look 'depressed' when clicked, but no menu appears and don't become 'undepressed' on a second click. Not sure if that's because I'm in the middle of an alt-tab or if it's also part of this bug.

didrocks suggested I revert my compiz settings (which I don't remember mucking with), as I have many non-standard plugins enabled. So after doing:

metacity --replace
gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compiz-1
gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compizconfig-1
compiz --replace

I'm back to a working unity. So seems like one of my non-standard plugins was screwing it up.

I spoke too soon. Logging out and back in gave me the same problem. Going to a console and simply running:

metacity --replace
compiz --replace

Gave me a working unity again. So it's not a configuration/plugin issue, but something odder.

Seems like the input windows that we use to get xinput are not doing their job. Either they are stacking incorrectly or are not positioned/sized correctly. As it's fixed with a restart of compiz, I wonder if it's a race on startup...Jason?

Confirmed following upgrade/reboot in the last half-an-hour. The menus did not respond until I run a GNOME-Terminal (from the short-cut I keep on the desktop for just such occasions).

Note to any others that are affected by this bug but do not have the foresight of Paul: you can still bring up a terminal by pressing Alt-Ctrl-T.

This hasn't happened to me recently. Either newer versions of the stack fixed it or I'm just now on the other side of the race condition.

seems to be reproducible as bug #685504

This was incorrectly marked as a duplicate of bug 685682, but that bug is about ATI drivers, where you can see from my Xorg.log here that I'm using intel drivers. I've unmarked this as a duplicate.

I am also experiencing this, using an NVidia card, so it might not be a graphic hardware-related issue, or (unlikely) an issue affecting ATI, NVidia and Intel graphic cards (that is, almost every computer).

@Michael Terry - Thank you for your tip regarding the CTRL+ALT+T combination to bring up the Unity interface. I have an Acer Aspire 5516 laptop with ATI Radeon graphics, and the AMD Athlon 64 bit mobile processor. In order to get Unity to respond to my mouse clicks, I had to log into the Classic Desktop a few times to apply system updates, THEN I was able to get Unity (via the installation of Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha) to work in a semi-stable fashion. As we speak, I'm still getting strange white lines across the top left and right hand sides of my screen. Also the icons that appear in the launcher to the left of my screen have a really grainy background. Other than than, I will continue to issue the sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade commands to keep my distro up to date with the latest Daily Builds.

I can confirm the issue.
At some point some menus did work for some apps, but I have not discovered any
reliably way to trigger this and I do not see any pattern.

This doesn't sound like a video driver issue to me. Sounds more like something is grabbing the mouse.

Just to confirm that I'm still hitting this. I had earlier reported that it went away, but it was apparently just lurking.

I just hit this for the first time in a long while after updating compiz and unity today -- to 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop4-0ubuntu5 and 3.2.16-0ubuntu1 respectively.

Hey Michael, maybe it's related to the hang I'm having as well.

Can you click on nautilus still or the whole interface is frozen? (you just see the mouse refreshing)

didrocks, the issue you are facing is fixed for me if unity-places-* are removed

@Omer: you're made of awesome! Removing the places package made it. Now time for debugging :)
Thanks!

Didier, I don't recall being able to click on nautilus in the launcher and have it launch. But I'm not 100% sure I tested it. (To be clear, all windows already open are still interactive. It's just unity that stops working in this bug.)

From what I can tell, this is caused by the nux event loop getting "stuck". I think this is caused by passing in foreign events and using x calls with the wrong server. Will post a merge for nux.

Jason, we need an update as to whether your nux work landed and when people can test it.

Should be fixed (cross fingers)

This bug was fixed in the package unity - 3.4.2-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity (3.4.2-0ubuntu1) natty; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - add --distro switch to remove local installation of unity with default
      options (LP: #715703)
    - global search and speedups in places
    - Using fade effect to cut the window Title when it's longer than the panel
      (LP: #694924)
    - Launcher - Add ability for apps to indicate progress through Launcher icon
      (LP: #676596)
    - calling unity should kill unity-panel-service (LP: #711289)
    - unity places should return a default icon when no matching icon is found
      (LP: #711200)
    - the launcher should start hidding when an icon is clicked (LP: #709178)
    - Highlight drag-friendly Launcher tiles when dragging a file (LP: #607782)
    - Fix migrate_favorites.py crashed with OSError in get_log_file(): [Errno 2]
      No such file or directory: '/home/ubuntu/.local/share/unity' (LP: #711964)
    - places should support wrong Icon= format (with extensions) (LP: #711189)
    - unity crashed with AttributeError in reset_unity_compiz_profile():
      'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get_default_value' (LP: #711105)
    - unity crashed with GError in reset_unity_compiz_profile() (LP: #710876)
    - Middle click on application icon should open a new window (LP: #709707)
    - Launcher - Add interaction to support dragging and dropping behind the
      launcher (LP: #702482)
    - Launcher - Enable dragging and dropping of files & folders to Launcher
      icons (LP: #676549)
    - Launcher - Add number notifier to Launcher icons (LP: #676455)
    - Support dragging files to trash to delete them (LP: #619686)
    - [launcher] Indicator-only applications showing as open applications
      (LP: #703396)
    - Unity does not accept mouse clicks (LP: #683328)
    - dash is empty (LP: #710792)
  * debian/control:
    - depends on latest nux
 -- Didier Roche <email address hidden> Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:45:47 +0100

I am also affected. Bugs like this makes me question why unity was released in such a state and how long will ubuntu live if it is being developed so carelessly?

Valentas,

This bug is marked as Fixed Released. If you continue to experience a similar problem then please log a new bug. Thanks...