Ubuntu – Mouse cursor won’t appear on boot

11.10cursormouse

It's still there, but it's invisible! Logging out makes it appear again, but logging out and back in after each boot is quite a nuisance. Any ideas?

Switching to Unity 2D seems to make the cursor appear when it's on the sidebar and topbar, but not when it's on the wallpaper or any applications

Also it appears that only the default pointer arrow cursor isn't showing: the hourglass cursor or finger cursors appear just fine! >:O

Tried changing the cursor theme following this guide – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hu9JrdSXB8 – and even though the theme changed successfully, the default-state pointer is still invisble expect when on the side/topbar…

Having made a fresh install, the problem persists >:[

Best Answer

I had this problem on a Dell Optiplex 955. It has something to do with the video drivers and the default cursor set. You can set SWCursor on in your xorg configuration as discussed in this Ubuntu Forums post, however that has some performance impact (probably negligible on modern systems though).

What I did is edit /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme and changed DMZ-White to whiteglass (you can change it to any of the non-DMZ themes in /usr/share/icons with a cursor directory in its subdirectory like whiteglass or redglass)

After doing that, log out and back in to restart the X server.

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Ubuntu – Mouse pointer size problem

You can set mouse cursor size for the user running lightdm. In my case it's root, so all I have to do:

echo "Xcursor.size: 24" >> /root/.Xdefaults

Hopefully it helps.

Ubuntu – How to hide the mouse cursor

Try unclutter.

The purpose of this program is to hide the pointer after the mouse has not moved for a while. Using it, you can make the pointer appear only when the user touches the screen, and disappear right after it. Maybe this was not exactly what you were aiming for, but it is much easier than your alternative.

To use it, first install it:

sudo apt-get install unclutter

then run it:

unclutter -idle 0.01 -root

The number in the above command is the number of seconds before the pointer disappears (in this case, 1/100 seconds).

Best Answer

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