mouse cursor gone

[Dennis Rolke]

The mouse cursor is gone when the GUI starts. The mouse itself is responding, but the pointer is invisible. Very annoying. I do have a workaround. One must simply restart the lightdm interface with the following command in the terminal: "sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm restart". Mouse cursor is suddenly visible again.

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Expanded Workaround confirmed by several users courtesy of Mark Kirkwood (mark-kirkwood-k) in comment 2:

A. TEST

1. hold down shift immediately at boot until the GRUB boot manager menu shows
2. highlight the 'Ubuntu' entry and press 'e' to Edit it
3. navigate to the line that begins "linux ..."
4. navigate to the word "splash" and delete it
5. boot using the modified setting by pressing Ctrl+X or F10

B. If the test change caused the cursor to show:

1. edit "/etc/default/grub/" (will need sudo/gksudo/kdesudo for elevated privileges); remove "splash" from the variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=. Save the file.
2. "sudo update-grub". This will make the change to the kernel command-line that was done manually in TEST A.
3. Reboot and test

I've added the 'plymouth' package as a possible cause of the issue. It is likely more a case of the console being put into the wrong graphics mode to support the graphical splash.
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I am using an old ASUS A6000 A6V laptop with the following hardware information (obtained via "lspci")

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 04)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 04)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 04)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 04)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d4)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 04)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X700 (PCIE)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)
02:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b3)
02:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 08)
02:01.2 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
02:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 08)
02:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG [Calexico2] Network Connection (rev 05)

I appreciate any help on this matter to get this small bug fixed.

Dennis

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Lightdm doesn't handle the cursor, seems rather an xorg issue

[Mark Kirkwood (mark-kirkwood-k)]

Dennis, I have run into this on oneiric too (see bug 818852). I found removing splash from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub results in the cursor showing properly every boot. It would be interesting to see if this works for you too (remember to run update-grub...).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Dennis Rolke (dennisrolke81)]

Mark, you are a star. Turning of splash fixed the issue for me. That is an excellent workaround.
Thanks very much. I already created an Xorg file manually, because I thought I'd have to add a few lines in the "Device" section to get the issue resolved, but never mind. Your solution is excellent. Dennis

[Mark Kirkwood (mark-kirkwood-k)]

Awesome, glad it helped!

I also note that my hardware is an Asus mobo (a8v-x) with Radeon gpu (9800 pro), so we are probably both running the radeon Xorg driver. So this guy could be the culprit (might be interesting to switch login display managers to gdm and see if mouse issue persists)...

[Dennis Rolke (dennisrolke81)]

Well, I tried to login with gdm as well, but no luck. Issue persisted. I had to restart both, gdm and lightdm, to get the cursor back again. Thanks again for your help. Dennis

[Babstar (debian-lists)]

The grub method didn't work for me on two machines (stock standard Lenovo T60).

Interestingly, if I logout the mouse pointer appears in the GDM login screen, then it works fine when I login.

[Mark Kirkwood (mark-kirkwood-k)]

Interesting - sorry to state obvious, but you did run update-grub afterwards, right?

[Babstar (debian-lists)]

Interesting - sorry to state obvious, but you did run update-grub afterwards, right?

Good point. After running update-grub it now works. Apologies for the misleading info.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Dennis Rolke, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xorg-server REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Please note, given that the information from the prior release is already available, doing this on a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xorg-server (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Oneiric has been EOL since May 9, 2013. For more on this please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases .

If one is having an issue in Ubuntu, please file a new report.