Help - have I been hacked? Cinnamon Mint 19.3 [SOLVED]

[wildalaska]

Weird. It's like there is a ghost in my PC. The cursor keeps going to the icon just to the right of the MINT start button and clicking it. Yes, really. Currently I have the Nemo icon there. I figured it was the least dangerous or irritating. I just left the computer for 4 hours and it opened 9 instances of Nemo. It will try to do this to whatever icon is to the right of the start button. And it also may reset the screen lock timeout - it sometimes stays unlocked far past the timeout.

It just started doing this a week or so ago. It does keep some aps from running correctly. I did a 19.3 upgrade that included kernels and it stopped doing this for ~2 days.

Anyone have any ideas?

Rod

[xenopeek]

Do you have a laptop or desktop computer? With a laptop perhaps the touchpad driver is buggy. If it's a desktop computer have you tried with a different mouse?

[wildalaska]

Good question. It's a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series laptop with Core i7 8th gen quad core processor.

If it's the touchpad driver, it worked fine for 1.5 years.

[xenopeek]

It could have happened due to an update, some other software you installed or it could also be a hardware fault.

If it is easily reproducible I'd suggest to try — if you still have it — to boot from the Linux Mint 19.3 installation medium and see if you can reproduce the issue on that. If it is reproducible with that it starts to sound like hardware fault. If it's not reproducible it may indeed have happened due to an update. If you have Timeshift set up you might consider rolling back a week? To confirm the issue is going away with that.

The release notes of 19.3 also have some info about switching to a different touchpad driver: https://linuxmint.com/rel_tricia_cinnamon.php. If the current driver is buggy due to an update it may be a workaround to switch to a different driver.

[wildalaska]

Thanks, I'll try booting from Mint live. I could also try booting from W10 to see if it's hardware.

Problem with Timeshift is I may not have a suitable earlier version, because I did an upgrade from 19.2 to 19.3 to solve another issue I posted about (T-bird freezes; the upgrade to 1.3 fixed that) and forgot to do a snapshot at that time.

[wildalaska]

Xenopeek,

You may be on to something. When it was doing it in 19.3, I rebooted into Windows 10. Strange cursor there too, only in W10 the mouse cursor erratically blinked and appeared to rapidly shake, plus the touchpad didn't work at all. Then I booted into Mint 19.1/64 live, BUT was unable to replicate it. Then rebooted back into 19.3 but the problem seemed to disappear. So I rebooted back into W10 and this time the mouse and touchpad cursors worked normally. Last, rebooted back into 19.3, where I am now, and the cursor is behaving itself. At least for the time being.

In view of both 19.3 and W10 having mouse problems, I'm thinking it may be the mouse, so next time it does it, I'll dig up a spare mouse and see what happens.

Thanks

[AZgl1800]

I had one laptop which had the physical surface of the screen so close to the keyboard, that two sheets of printer paper would cause it to press some of the keys down.

get some sticky junk on your fingers, and leaving tidbits of peanuts on the keys, and when you close the screen, things happen.

check your screen to keyboard clearance.

[wildalaska]

That is sensitive. It could happen but in this case, the lid was not closed the entire time.

The issue could have been caused/fixed by Dell. Several days ago when around the time the issue started, I was in W10 when Dell, w/o permission, informed me it did an update. Then today when I was in W10, as mentioned above, and the cursor was blinking, Dell once again, w/o permission, did an 'update.' No effect on the blinking cursor, and Dell did not request a reboot. But the next time I booted into W10, the cursor was OK. And it's still OK in 19.3. So if the problem stays away, I may conclude it was a Dell issue. If so, I plan to post it here.

[wildalaska]

HELP!!! Problem came back, only worse. Mint 19.3 Tricia running off a very fast SSD. Mouse SELF-CLICKS and the cursor randomly jumps around. The laptop is almost unusable - even typing this was a big hassle.

The problem does not exist on an identical 19.3 running off a 1TB W-D HDD, same laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series) but I hate that slow disk.

I suspect there are corrupted files. How can I copy the system files from the working 19.3 to the corrupted SSD?

(I'd upgrade to 20.1 but it's huge hassle.)

[AZgl1800]

Suggestion:

Disable the Touch-pad,
use a USB or wired mouse and see if the problem is gone.

Personally, I have disabled the Touch-pad on every laptop I have ever owned.

To me, they are an abomination because my thumbs keep touching the pad while typing.
Which causes the mouse cursor to jump somewhere it don't belong, and my new text is inserted in bad places....

[wildalaska]

Well I FINALLY found the problem. I hoped a clean install might fix it. So I upgraded to Mint Cinnamon 20.1. After I updated from 19.3 to 20.1, which was a huge hassle (I just used the 20.1 iso, booted to 20.1 live, and reformatted the partition that had 19.3, since 19.3 Update Manager did not have an option to seamlessly upgrade, but wanted me to painfully use terminal to first make a useless upgrade to 20.0), the problem temporarily went away. Until I copied my 19.3 .config folder to 20.1, first renaming the 20.1 .config. The 19.3 config updated my panel the way I preferred, but the cursor problem cam back. So I restored the 20.1 config and then, one by one, copied the 19.3 config folders to 20.1. When I got to dconf the issue returned. Seems it was something in the 19.3 dconf/user file. So, because I was unable to locate the format for user, and it's a binary, I had to, painfully, reconstruct my preferred panel/task bar configuration.

[xenopeek]

Glad you got it solved and it wasn't anything hardware/driver related but some configuration issue. Those can be hard to pin down but yes as you did copying the config files from old system one by one should find which introduces the problem.

I don't know how to read a copied dconf file either. Before you upgraded you could have run dconf dump / > dconf-backup on your Linux Mint 19.3 system to take a system and human readable backup of the dconf settings. Hindsight and that doesn't help you now.

Hopefully a (large) bump in the road passed and your Linux Mint install will be smooth from here on out!

[wildalaska]

Xenopeek, thanks for your help. That was weird. It caused the cursor to randomly jump around and then clicked it! Like a ghost.

What did you think about my upgrade method? I posted it in detailed form here viewtopic.php?f=208&t=347407

Here is a detail on how I fixed T-B
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 073864&e=0

And thanks for the dconf backup tip. It worked, now at least I can read it.

[xenopeek]

You can also install the package dconf-editor, which gives you a GUI program called "dconf Editor" to browse through the settings, change them (or reset to system value) and such. Sometimes useful for troubleshooting.

Upgrade steps look fine. I've had to struggle with TB for somebody on a Windows after a restore from backup as well. Similar issue as you describe, getting a new TB install to use the old profile files was a sequence of jumping through hoops. Glad you got there.

[wildalaska]

I believe all users who can, should support Mint and TB with donations. That said, by donating, I figure I have more rights to complain. TB needs to make their upgrades more user friendly.

I had installed the dconf editor but was unable to get it to browse to the dconf/user file and open it. Know any tricks?

[xenopeek]

Know any tricks?

That's what I mean earlier: I don't know how to get it to read a file copied from another system. I just mentioned the tool as sometimes programs have hidden settings or such and you can use dconf Editor to change them on your system, or reset settings to system default for some program and such things. It doesn't help with reading a dconf file copied from another system I think.

[wildalaska]

I can't get it to open dconf/user because I can't give it the path it wants, even when I put dconf/user and user directly on the desktop. If I select "chose a program" and enter /bin/dconf-editor, I get this error: "Cannot find key "/home/rod/Desktop/user" (and a similar error mess if I try to open dconf).

I must be missing something here.

[wildalaska]

Glad it helped. I got lucky; a little like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. For sure a strange problem. And Xenopeek helped. Now, when I get time (!!!*#!) I would like to go through the text dconf-backup and find just exactly what caused the ghost problem.