Mouse pointer invisible while stationary on Fedora 17
 

Hello everyone,

It has been a very long time since I last used linux, and this time I'm giving Fedora a whirl, and I'm loving everything about it so far. However, one thing I'm noticing that is irking me quite a bit is that my mouse pointer is invisible while stationary. I don't exactly know what causes it, whether it's a setting somewhere I can alter, or if it's the result of writing free drivers for proprietary cards, or what-have-you.

A few quick Google searches revealed nothing that was very useful or dated in the last three years, so I'll ask here!

Thanks

Haven't seen that at all... and not seen the symptom in over 10 years.

Cursor visibility isn't a property of the driver or video card. If the cursor is visible at any time (such as your motion), it has to do with the cursor font. There are two parts to a cursor - the foreground and a mask. If the mask is missing, then the cursor (usually black) will dissapear with a black background. During normal operation, the cursor is exclusively or'ed with the mask (which generates transparent pixels) which is then placed on the display. If the mask is wrong then the entire cursor image will disappear. Motion, however, uses thing in a slightly different order as the cursor is removed (which may leave a trace when the mask is bad, but screen refresh may cover that with a redisplay of the rectangle enclosing the cursor) and the new cursor position displayed. One key with the cursor mask is that is should be one pixel larger than the cursor itself. Normally this causes a white outline around the cursor.

The usual "disappearing" cursor is from having an error with the cursor color (white cursor won't show on a white background). This may be a problem with some applications rather than all as applications can choose the cursor to use (such as the text cursor in text fields on a browser).

As to a fix... don't know exactly what went wrong. It isn't necessarily an easy thing to do remotely.

Try running Appearance, from the Preferences menu, and choose Customise on the Theme page. There you can alter Pointer and see if that helps.