Selecting faces doesn't work

Having trouble with selecting any faces in edit mode. When I try to select one, it only seldom actually works, but most of the time some other random face gets selected. Trying to select faces with RMB and Shift held down produces some random faces from acroos the whole object getting selected but not the ones I click on.
Read about other users having this issue, too, and in another thread to upgrade Blender to latest version, which I did (removed debian wheezy version and downloaded binary version 2.71, but the problem remains.
Someone else said it’s somehow related to some graphic cards settings, but that user was on windows and being on linux there’s really not much I could change in regard to graphic card settings.
I don’t believe that that’s the reason, too, because why would my graphic card be to blame if blender is the only program on my computer that miraculously somehow isn’t able to read the position of my mouse pointer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, because it’s not really convenient to model without being able to select faces.
Thanks!

Someone else said it’s somehow related to some graphic cards settings, but that user was on windows and being on linux there’s really not much I could change in regard to graphic card settings.
I don’t believe that that’s the reason, too, because why would my graphic card be to blame if blender is the only program on my computer that miraculously somehow isn’t able to read the position of my mouse pointer.
If you have an NVidia card, disabling antialiasing in the graphics card control panel can overcome random vertex selection issues. No idea how you would do this on something like Linux

Yes, overriding application preference for antialiasing can cause selection issues. Disable that if it’s set