Mouse pointer remains after shutting down X

Its All in your Head · 07-10-2007, 10:31 AM

Hello everyone!

While more of an annoyance than anything else, I have an issue with the mouse pointer. Since I do most of the work on my Debian machine in the command line, I don't really use a desktop manager, but occasionally (if I need to use a web browser for anything), I'll load up XFCE4, and then when I'm finished, I'll logout of XFCE (effectivelly shutting down the X server I'm assuming) and continue working in the terminal.

Unfortunately, when I log out of XFCE, my mouse pointer remains on the screen where it last was when X shut down, over top of the terminal. I can't move it using the mouse, and it doesn't scroll off the screen. Obviously if I reboot the computer, it goes away, but it seems silly to have to reboot every time I want to go back to the terminal.

I didn't see any strange error messages when X shut down, so I'm at a loss as to what could be the issue.

If it helps, my video card is an eVGA GeForce 6600GT, and I haven't done anything special as far as video drivers go (like I said, I spend 95% of my time in the command line, so I didn't see a need to installing new drivers).

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Junior Hacker · 07-10-2007, 11:30 PM

When I saw the title of your thread, the first thing that came to mind is insufficient video drivers or non-existing drivers. I have no problems installing the binaries from nvidia site, but you need kernel headers, gcc and the likes installed. How exactly are you going back into non-graphical mode?, you may still have X running, then again, without sufficient graphics driver, it is also possible X is not shutting down properly in respects to refreshing the screen.

pplude92 · 07-11-2007, 08:30 AM

Isn't there a console mouse driver. I forget the name. Can anyone help me out here, I think it might be related to that.

nx5000 · 07-11-2007, 08:45 AM

Could be gpm
Gpm should not run while X is running, could interact.

Its All in your Head · 07-11-2007, 05:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Junior Hacker

When I saw the title of your thread, the first thing that came to mind is insufficient video drivers or non-existing drivers. I have no problems installing the binaries from nvidia site, but you need kernel headers, gcc and the likes installed. How exactly are you going back into non-graphical mode?, you may still have X running, then again, without sufficient graphics driver, it is also possible X is not shutting down properly in respects to refreshing the screen.

I followed the procedure on a Debian WIKI to install nvidia drivers, and voila! my mouse properly disappears after shutting down X. I was using the 'nv' driver before, and I guess it wasn't refreshing right after X shut down, now when I shut down X, I get a full screen refresh, and then I'm back in a clean command line.

To shut down X, I use XFCE's logout command.

Thanks for the help