Comment 14 for bug 552214

I can confirm this bug with 10.04 32-bit on another machine (old Athlon64 desktop with ATI Radeon 9250 AGP card, open source ATI driver), mouse cursor disappears after suspend to RAM and resume (which appears to work fine otherwise).

Workaround: use "X -configure" to generate /etc/X11/xorg.conf (which doesn't exist by default) and specify the option below:

Option "SWcursor" "on"

It seems the HW cursor state is not restored across S3 suspend/resume. The cursor probably appears again when its shape is changed (for example, to a little wheel which indicates "please wait"), entering the screensaver password is one such situation. I knew the "SWcursor" option as it has already helped me a few times to work around graphics HW/driver bugs in the past years.

VT switch to text console and back is another fix. Perhaps such VT switch could be invoked automagically as part of suspend/resume - switch to text console then suspend, resume then switch back to X (it doesn't take very long, and should restore all of the graphics state, not just the cursor, avoiding potential similar bugs in non-ATI drivers as well - VT switching is decades old and much better tested on a lot of hardware, than the relatively recent and still fragile ACPI S3 support)?