Mouse cursor disapears with some apps like Netbeans, Google maps, Wine
 

Hello.

My mouse cursor disappears when I use some applications like

Netbeans IDE - when I drag objects
GoogleMaps (embedded in Firefox) and GoogleEarth - always
Wine - always

By 'always' I mean that when I move the cursor onto the area of those applications, it simply becomes invisible.

This is because I'm using

in xorg.conf.

This is due some graphic card's issues. The card is a:

I'm using Fedora with 2.6.30.5-43.fc11.x86_64 kernel (and 4GiB RAM).

The card works perfectly with the default Fedora open drivers even if it's old and not (still) greatly supported, and the mouse cursor never flickers or gives troubles apart from the above described.

The questions are:

Has someone already experienced similar problems and has (s)he found any workaround?
I'm wondering if it's an Openchrome bug.

Thanks.
Have a nice day.

At first glance, the workaround is not to invoke the SWCursor option. It's likely that the cursor is changing from an arrow to some other symbol when you drag something, and that other symbol isn't available because of the selected options. You may find out more by reading:

/var/log/xorg.0.log

Thanks for the answer.

I need to use Options SWCursor because, without disabling HWCursor, the cursor appears like boxed in a garbage of random pixels whose size is about 80x30... :(

The weird fact is that those problem arose when I added some RAM (by reaching 4GiB of total size). The CPU is x86_64 though.

I'm wondering if I'm needed to downgrade my RAM configuration only just because those small troubles.

That doesn't sound like a reasonable remedy. Isn't there a poster somewhere that says, "You can have my 4 GB of RAM only if you tear it out of my cold, dead fingers"?

I don't know what the issue is, but I would avoid radical remedies just yet. Maybe your video driver needs upgrading.

Here's an idea -- run a live Linux CD/DVD and see if the same problem is present. That way you separate hardware from software issues.

I think it is a graphical card issue. Maybe its memory is overwritten by the RAM (or vice-versa?). I repeat: everything started when I upgraded my memory configuration, and that it's a x86_64 system, thus it sounds me very weird.

By booting live distributions (I tried both Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04, x86 and x86_64) the trouble is always the garbaged boxed cursor, as HWCursor is enabled by default. SWCursor simply forces the cursor to appear with its own "proper" shape.

Please note Ubuntu 9.04 cannot even recognize the highest screen resolution N and sets automatically the Xorg server to use the N-1 one.

Fedora does and sets the right N with graphical effects enabled.

My graphical card drivers are upgraded to the last version, and I did a yum upgrade just yesterday. This small issue looking as a bug is really annoying me because doesn't allow to work as usual with Netbeans. And this is a very big point for me.

I think it's not still recomended to upgrade to version 12 Alpha.

Am I wrong?