Debian Multimedia :: Failed Script Prevents Lightdm From Starting

I'm using MATE with Lightdm as display manager in Jessie and I've been using a very simple script run from /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/01_debian.conf to slow down the mouse cursor, something like

Code: Select all#!/bin/bash

xinput --set-prop 10 269 -1

xinput --set-prop 10 267  1.100000
the script was placed in my ~ and called from 01_debian.conf , and so far it used to work.

Lately this script wasn't executed properly, most likely because I had unplugged the mouse from its usb port and then plugged again in a different port, and as a result Lightdm wouldn't start at all.

After much trying, because this by coincidence happened after the update to 8.4, I realized that it wasn't a serious failure of the X server as I suspected (the update included a new version of the flgrx driver), but a simple matter of Lightdm failing because of this script: in fact, I could still manually start the session with startx as regular user, although this only gave me access to a LXDE session instead of MATE (I have also the LXDE environment because when I installed Jessie I did use the LXDE version and then added MATE).

What happened was that the mouse properties were scrambled up, so xinput --set-prop 10 269 -1 had now to be something like xinput --set-prop 10 268 -1 and so on - therefore the script failed and in turns Lightdm failed as well.

-is this supposed to happen when you unplug the mouse and then plug it back in a different usb port? It reminds me of some windows-like behavior, where usb peripherals had to be always in the same port to work properly.

-is Ligthdm supposed to fail because of this, or is it kind of a bug? It looks weird to me that instead of simply not executing the script, the whole display manager fails.

In testing, with an identical setup, as a matter of fact the script failed as well (it's on another partition on the same hardware) but Lightdm started as usual.

-when trying to modify the mouse properties in that script, I couldn't get them right again: what looked correct in the booted system, was once again off at the next reboot (i.e. property 269 was 270 again and so on), therefore I ditched the above setup and placed everything in the .xsessionrc file, and it worked again.

-why startx defaulted to the LXDE environment? where is this setting stored? How could I have specified to start a MATE session instead from command line?