systemsettings

Recover from invisible mouse due to misconfiguration

Thu, 07/06/2017 - 05:52 - augustin

The linked wiki page describes a scenario whereby a misconfigured monitor width and refresh rate causes the mouse cursor to be completely invisible. Fortunately, it was possible to login (ssh, actually) as another user, and manually edit the configuration file. In that case, I was fortunate that I knew the exact time of when the problem started occurring, I had a working user, so I simply had to compare files changed at that time, between the working and non-working users.

KDE/X.org should allow the user to recover easily from such misconfiguration.

~/.config/systemsettingsrc

Wrong values in this file may cause X Windows to fail displaying the mouse cursor:
http://linux.overshoot.tv/wiki/invisible_mouse_cursor

Example content:

[MainWindow]
Height 768=769
MenuBar=Disabled
State=AAAA/wAAAAD9AAAAAAAABVAAAAKrAAAABAAAAAQAAAAIAAAACPwAAAABAAAAAgAAAAEAAAAWAG0AYQBpAG4AVABvAG8AbABCAGEAcgEAAAAA/////wAAAAAAAAAA
ToolBarsMovable=Disabled
Width 1360=1361

Cannot start systemsettings

systemsettings is the KDE system configuration tool.
Usually, it is started via the Kickoff Application Launcher, but you can also start with ALT+F2 and type 'systemsettings', or start from a konsole.

If it happens that you cannot start it, that none of the methods to launch the application work, without there being any apparent error (e.g. starting from a konsole gives no output, and nothing starts), it may be that systemsettings is already running in the background. Find it or find its pid, kill it if necessary and start again.

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