i'm using a mandriva box to play a video file in
an art gallery all day. whenever the video file
recycles, the mouse cursor reappears in the center
of the screen. how can i disable this behaviour?

i'm trying to make the running of the piece as
simple as possible so as not to involve those
working in the gallery beyond having to turn the
box on and off.

to that end i've set the player, kaffeine, to
start the file on boot, in full screen mode, and
with the playlist repeating. the only two issues
left are that the mouse cursor appears in the
center of the screen when the video recycles, and
that the filename also appears in the upper left
corner when the video recycles.

my intuition tells me the filename appearing is a
kaffeine behaviour, while the mouse is a system
behaviour.

any tips on eliminating these two things are most
appreciated.

thanks,
BabaG

(oh, yeah, mandriva 2007.1)

Unplug the mouse. maybe before boot.

Hope that helps.

Regards, Glenn

If that doesn't work comment out the mouse section in xorg.conf.

will look into the xorg.conf option. not ideal as
it would be hard to get the mouse back if someone
working in the gallery needed to do something with
the box.

leaving mouse unplugged leaves the cursor immobile
in the center of the screen.

thanks,
BabaG

Oh, Bugger. The headless server idea was simply that, no monitor and only remote access using webmin tools.

I think the xorg concept may work, have two files.

You will have two files if you edit the original(current) file.

I apologise if I am stating the obvious, the old file is usually appended with a tilda(~).

and quite quickly you could do a rename of it to get the mouse back.

That may involve restarting the session. Logging out, renaming the file with mv or cp then logging in.

You may be able to setup a macro or bash script to do the job or a combination key stroke.

Have you been able to read the xorg readme, I wonder if there are any tips there.

I'm intreigued now, but have little else to offer.

do the arrow keys of the number-pad move the mouse, with numlock off?

good luck.

Umm. Comment the mouse section in xorg.conf and use a USB-mouse. That is dynamically recognized during a session (at least under SuSE 10.0 and 10.3), so if anybody needs a mouse, (s)he will just have to plug one in...