Invisible mouse cursor

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An invisible mouse cursor is most likely caused by a failure of the X Windows graphic drivers.

Please update this page with other causes which may cause the mouse cursor to be invisible, links to upstream bugs, and the solutions.

KDE: Monitor resolution and refresh rate

This section is based on a real life scenario and the solution found. Please this section to confirm certain points.

On a system, one user experienced this symptom (invisible mouse cursor within KDE) while everything was working fine. This pointed at a misconfiguration of KDE for the affected user. Also, the screen resolution appeared to be wrong.

First, it was attempted to copy ~/.config/systemsettingsrc of the working user directory to the one of the affected user. According to the timestamp, the file had been modified at the time the problem started. Also, the width/height values were apparently erroneous. After rebooting, the problem was the same.

Then, ~/.local/share/kscreen/8c8a2226178ca74946ccb77ac7d253ac was copied from the unaffected user to the affected one. After rebooting (restarting X may have sufficed), the system was fixed.
Here is part of the before and after values of the given file:

// Before:
"mode" : { "refresh" : 75.0762, "size" : { "height" : 768, "width" : 1024 } }
// After:
"mode" : { "refresh" : 60.0152, "size" : { "height" : 768, "width" : 1360 } }

It appears that the refresh and width values were the wrong ones for the given monitor.

It is unclear whether changing systemsettingsrc was necessary for the fix. For the record, and for comparison purposes, here is the working version of .kde/share/config/systemsettingsrc:

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

and here is the broken one:
[MainWindow]
Height 480=512
Height 600=512
Height 768=512
MenuBar=Disabled
State=AAAA/wAAAAD9AAAAAAAAAs4AAAHiAAAABAAAAAQAAAAIAAAACPwAAAABAAAAAgAAAAEAAAAWAG0AYQBpAG4AVABvAG8AbABCAGEAcgEAAAAA/////wAAAAAAAAAA
ToolBarsMovable=Disabled
Width 1024=718
Width 640=720
Width 800=720

Compare with the width before/after values of kscreen posted above.

Other

Bug 15623 - mouse cursor is totally invisible in KDE
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15623

Issues related to this page:

ProjectSummaryStatusPriorityCategoryLast updatedAssigned to
Linux softwareRecover from invisible mouse due to misconfigur…activenormalfeature request7 years 17 weeks