I'm building a digital picture frame.

I did a commandline install of Ubuntu on an old laptop and then got xorg over apt. When I startx (I have no window manager, and no mouse), most of the screen is grey, with the active window taking up the top-left quarter of the screen. I'm sure I need to specify the resolution in the xorg.conf but i'm not sure how. This isn't a great problem, just annoying to waste the screen.

I'm also having trouble getting rid of the mouse cursor, which sits in the middle of the screen because i have no mouse...I tried the method of blank bitmap here, doing it in tty1 while X was running on tty7 but i get
.
I thought maybe it was from entering the command on a different tty than the one that was running X but when I put the command in my Xsession, right next to other commands that work, X fails to launch.

Maybe to fix both problems I should go with a window manager? I don't want to give up much disk space.

It usually works to find someone who's done this before...

for your resolutions - compare you xorg.conf with another that works.
for your mouse pointer - there is an enlightening discussion on this here.

Does your xorg.conf have a mouse section? If so, try to comment it out. If that doesn't help search LQ for kiosk and mouse, I remember seeing a discussion of that problem for a kiosk set up.

<edit> ooops, I didn't see Simon's post. Please ignore this one </edit>

That has almost nothing to do with me because he has internet access and I don't, he has a window manager and I don't, and he has more than 1GB of hard disk space and I don't. He does say, however, that he uses feh for 'fullscreen and no-mouse-pointer goodness'. I use feh and fullscreen, but the mouse pointer remains. It must be because I don't have a window manager.

I tried. Heck I deleted it completely.


EDIT: After rtfmp again, it seems feh has a --hide-pointer option. It works here at work, but I'll have to see if it works on the laptop, since it doesn't have a window manager.

there is a window manager (or de? forgot) which is especially for those who prefer keyboard only, or just dont have a mouse. its called Ratpoison - rat is the mouse, so its like mousepoison =)

That's sort of my point. When you depart substantially from the trodden path, expect rocks and weeds. A WM would help - however - the knowledge that someone else has had success with feh tells you to look again. Which you did:Note for next time - I could have just told you to use the --hide-pointer option had you been specific about what you had tried. If you ask a general question you will only get a general answer which will not obviously point out your exact solution.

Well, technically it's not a window, since you have no WM. If you really don't want a WM, you can use ~/.Xdefaults to configure your terminal application. Maybe you can configure the initial size (80x24 by default, surely).

But, just for the sake of usability, I advise to you use a WM. Ratpoison has been suggested, and it will take just a few k's on your disk. Dwm is another good one for those worried about every kb. Neither of these will need a mouse to work.

Try unclutter if nothing else works:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/X11/contr...utter-8.README