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I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit laptop, and I have a Microsoft mouse. When I'm on the battery power the mouse cuts in and out, I have full battery power so it's not because of low power. It never does this in Windows, and in the past when I ran Karmic it never did this either, only when I reinstalled Ubuntu with Natty. As soon as I plug in the power it works perfectly fine.

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do you see anything weird happening in dmesg? – user606723 Aug 3 '11 at 20:47
Doesn't look like anything weird is happening, but it's hard to tell, really overwhelming, a lot of info on dmesg. – Tory Aug 5 '11 at 7:11
This question appears to be abandoned and unanswered, could you perhaps add more detail to your question? If this question no longer applies then you can either delete it or answer it yourself if you've solved the problem. Thanks! – Jorge Castro Feb 11 '12 at 22:58

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Make sure you don't have the laptop-mode-tools or powertop packages installed. If you do, uninstall them by running 

sudo apt-get remove --purge laptop-mode-tools powertop && apt-get autoremove

This solved the issue for me on Mint 13 on an Alienware M14x R2.

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I think it's "powertop" instead of "powertools": sudo apt-get remove --purge laptop-mode-tools powertop && apt-get autoremove – chapagain Aug 27 '12 at 6:59
up vote 0 down vote

It seems like your computer is set to disable USB when iddle as a power saving measure.

This is usually suggested by powertop, but it's a very bad idea if you are using a USB mouse. This command fixes it temporally:

echo -1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/devices/yourmouse/../power/autosuspend

You need to substitute yourmouse for your mouse bus and device number, you can usually find it with:

lsusb

Unluckily this will work only until whatever the program that have changed the setting kicks on again: either at boot time, when you disconnect your computer from electricity, or whatever. You need to discover what package is changing it to resolve the issue.

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There doesn't seem to be anything in that directory with the name of the bus and device numbers – Tory Aug 5 '11 at 7:10
Can you post the output of both lsusb and ls /sys/bus/devices/ ?. – Javier Rivera Aug 5 '11 at 7:52
I also changed the command as the autosuspend parameters were wrong and there was a permission problem. – Javier Rivera Aug 5 '11 at 7:59
I managed to find the folder with the autosuspend file using the directory listing you posted above, but the value was already set to 2, and I ran the command directly from that folder anyways on the autosuspend file, but nothing changed because like I said, it was already set to two. – Tory Aug 5 '11 at 19:12
Also, it's constantly cutting in and out, and I just noticed in the power folder runtime_status changes to suspended when it cuts out, and switches back to active when it comes back on. – Tory Aug 5 '11 at 19:20
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