Why my USB mouse gets suspended after 3 seconds of inactivity?

Mouse’s bottom LED goes off after 3 seconds after connection and cursor movements and wheel stops. Pressing any button, reconnecting or resetting USB device resumes it for another 3 seconds (when resumed by pressing button, this event does no go to X).

This happens when using any of USB ports. This mouse works well with other computer with Linux. It was working well before.

Why can it happen? How to fix it?

Update: It happens only if laptop is on battery.

Answer: this is caused by powersaving done by laptop-mode-tools. To temporary turn off powersaving one can use

for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control; do echo on > $i; done

It’s a very old question, related with laptop-mode, but I’ll post my solution:

In Ubuntu 14.04 I edited /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/usb-autosuspend.conf and change this lines to blacklist usbhid:

# The list of USB driver types that should not use autosuspend.  The driver
# type is given by "DRIVER=..." in a USB device's uevent file.
# Example: AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST="usbhid usb-storage"
## Old value: AUTOSUSPEND_USBTYPE_BLACKLIST=""
AUTOSUSPEND_USBTYPE_BLACKLIST="usbhid"

In Ubuntu 12.04 I must to edit /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/runtime-pm.conf and change this lines to blacklist usbhid:

# The list of device driver types that should use autosuspend.  The driver
# type is given by "DRIVER=..." in a device's uevent file.
# Example: AUTOSUSPEND_DEVTYPE_WHITELIST="usbhid usb-storage"
## Old value: AUTOSUSPEND_RUNTIME_DEVTYPE_WHITELIST=""
AUTOSUSPEND_RUNTIME_DEVTYPE_WHITELIST="usbhid"

You can also blacklist usb-storage! and you can also blacklist device by ID (AUTOSUSPEND_RUNTIME_DEVID_WHITELIST in Ubuntu 12.04 or AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST in Ubuntu 14.04).

Then you’ll need to restart laptop mode for the changes to take effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart

And then replug mouse. The mouse will not suspend again.

This works for me at work (ubuntu 12.04) and home (ubuntu 14.04).

Hope It helps 🙂

I have the perfect solution!

If

for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control; do echo on > $i; done

works for you, but only once, edit /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/usb-autosuspend.conf to replace :

CONTROL_USB_AUTOSUSPEND="auto"

by

CONTROL_USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0

It works for me.

This is a normal behaviour of all mouses after they are getting wireless, to save battery. you can adjust it if it has a 3rd party software coming within the box.