Haines Brown said on Tue, 10 Aug 2021 11:11:24 -0400

>The problem I'm facing is indeed petty, but I hope that help in my
>trying to resolve it will be more widely useful.
>
>To take a break from work and to refresh the mind I run a copy of
>Klondike from aisleriot. Suddenly for no apparently reason it
>ceased to function properly. When I click on a card it greys out as it
>shoud but I cannot then move it with the mouse. The greyed out card
>stays in place.
>
>If the problem were with the X system I assume it would show up
>elsewhere. I reinstalled aisle-riot. It affects all aisleriot games
>that require dragging, and so apparently it is a gtk problem. How does
>one troubleshoot a misbehaving graphical application?

In this case I'd value fixing it quick over a guarantee of finding the
exact root cause. First quick and easy: I'd swap in a known good other
mouse. I'd disconnect and reconnect all keyboards and mouses next.
Then, I'd do the general maintenance of killing X, powering down the
computer, letting it alone for 30 seconds, logging in, running X, and
try Aisleriot again. All this stuff costs you 10 to 15 minutes and
rules out a lot.

After that I'd get to the harder stuff like seeing if it's software.
Find a live DVD distro with, or able to install aisleriot, and boot to
that DVD. If it works from there and not from Devuan, you need to start
diagnosing software. I'd start by finding applications, other than
aisleriot, that exhibit this behavior. Find commonalities between the
non-working softwares, and find distinctions between that group and the
group that does work. Did aisleriot or any seemingly related software
packages update around that time?

Also, try to remember when this problem appeared, and any other
symptoms/oddities/observations that happened around that same time. Try
to create and test hypotheses from that.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques