cursor 'ghosts' occuring
 

Hi All,

I was wondering if someone knew the solution to the following problem.

I am running Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger and have noticed that in some applications (especially Firefox, OpenOffice and Gedit), if I move the text cursor with the arrow keys, it leaves ghosts of the cursor behind (vertical lines).

It makes navigating where your text cursor really is, quite difficult..

*** Edit ***

I have also noticed that moving the mouse over an image in GIMP will leave little trails of dots where ever the mouse has been. Resizing the window makes these dots disappear.

There is no problem with cursor inside a terminal window though. It is only occuring in apps that use GUI.

My gfx card is an Nvidia GeForce 6200 with Turbo Cache.

In my xorg.conf file I have lines in the devices section that read:

option "hw cursor" "off"


Regards,
Greenie

You might try disabling the hardware cursor, if it's enabled. I looked in my xorg.conf file but right now it doesn't have the line in it. You'll find the wording for enabling/disabling the hardware cursor easily with a search here or on Google.

Isn't that hardware cursor relating to the mouse pointer?

Yes -- sometimes disabling the hardware cursor results in smoother display of the cursor "produced" by the mouse device. I don't know why, but it's true because I had a problem with trails once, or possibly with jerky action, and found this tip, and disabling hardware cursor fixed the problem. Currently I have a setup where hardware cursor works just fine. When disabling the hardware cursor, control of some of the display resulting from mouse movement is handed over to software, instead of coming directly from the device.

Sure, I'd beleive it.

However, I dont think its the solution to this problem because I am talking about a problem with the flashing text cursor that is visible when editing a URL in the address bar of Firefox, or when editing a text document.


There is nothing wrong with the mouse pointer.


The biggest issue is when you use the cursor keys on your keyboard to shift the text cursor within the address bar of Firefox.

What happens here is that the text cursor leaves a verticle line every step that the text cursor takes left or right.


For example, if I attempt to edit http://www.linuxquestions.org in the address bar of Firefox, I start with the text cursor at the right hand end of the URL and use the left cursor key to shift the cursor down to between the 'n' and the 'u', the URL in the address bar of Firefox ends up looking something like this:


http://www.lin|u|x|q|u|e|s|t|i|o|n|s.|o|r|g|


It's annoying!

Regards,
Greenie

bumping this due to new information in my original post which may help someone to help me solve this problem.

I agree with you that this probably has nothing at all to do with the mouse's cursor. I must not have been thinking clearly when I first read about your problem.

I've spent the last approx. one hour using Google to try to find out about this problem, with absolutely no usable results. Yet I've seen the same thing you're describing, on my own system at times--though not recently.

This kind of thing seems to happen to me when resources are very low due to some program misbehaving. But I'm sure there are many other possible causes.

I'm going to continue trying to find something, somewhere. If I get a good clue, I'll post back.

A possible clue in this page:

http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/...er/009834.html

Discussing an alleged bug in The Gimp, the author mentions that repainting of the cursor takes place "in the bowels of some window manager." That gave me pause for thought. Have you tried different environments--maybe two or three different window managers? If the problem disappeared in an environment other than the one you normally use, then there must be some interaction between the apps you're experiencing the ghosting in, and the window-managing environment.

I think it's worth a try...

Hi Jonr,

Many thanks for your continued effort in researching this.

I did discover that If I installed nvidia-glx using apt-get and then edited my xorg.conf file to suit, the cursor ghosting issue went away.

However, this then introduces a problem with Google Earth. (see my Google Earth thread here at Linux Questions in the Newbie forum).

Regards,
Greenie

Aha. My next step was going to be checking if you had the right Nvidia stuff. It took me several days to get mine set up right (I bought an Nvidia card just last week). A tip here is: do "sysinfo" (I think it may have to be as root). Somewhere in there will be a special Nvidia section that allows adjusting various Nvidia parameters. I experimented with it and found out what looked good and what was awful--and left it set the way that looked good, of course! :)

One handy thing you can adjust is the gamma level of the display, at the hardware level. xgamma does the same thing but with software; I figure whatever can be done with hardware is usually preferable. Now I have a display that doesn't blind me but preserves correct color values. Movies are a little dark--but the players generally allow brightness/contrast and even gamma control, or I could use xgamma temporarily.

Re: Google Earth. If it isn't one thing, it's another, isn't it? That is my daily experience. But every problem solved is something learned, I guess.

Thanks for taking the time to post what fixed this for you once you solved your problem!

I had exactly the same problem (I loved your example with the url), also with an Nvidia 6200 video card, and it was driving me and my wife nuts! I first had the problem on Suse 10.1, and because of that and the more common annoyances on that distro I tried Ubuntu Dapper Drake (same problem). I queried the issue before posting my own question, and saw your question/answer. I installed the nvidia-glx like you said, and then had to edit my xorg.conf line for the driver from "nv" to "nvidia". After a reboot to reload X, now everything works great!

I know this is a little thing, but I'm extremely tickled to have finally fixed this nagging problem!

No problems Mountain Man,

Just dont expect the Linux version of Google Earth to work well with the nvidia-glx drivers installed.

When I try Google Earth with those drivers installed, I get holes appear everywhere in Google Earth.


However, if you do happen to try Google Earth for Linux out of curiosity and it works for you, I'd love to know how you got it to work, because for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get Google Earth to work with the nvidia-glx driver.

Regards,
greenie

I've found that the little things add up rapidly when you spend a lot of time at the computer. I run into people who can't see that background colors, etc. are important. I think they would if they had to look at the screen as much as I do. Same with a problem like this cursor one. I'm glad the solution was found and posted, too.

I know what you guys are talking about, but I thought I'd chime in to note that this happens in some text on my MacBook! I never really bothered to look into it...