Weird mouse cursor
The mouse cursor on my Ubuntu Edgy Eft Linux (and on previous versions of Ubuntu as well) has been acting weird for a while.
The mouse cursor was perfectly consistent with the theme I had chosen
except when I placed the cursor on a, say, flash animation on a web
page, the cursor turned into a large square which looked like a two
dimensional barcode.
The same thing happened in OpenOffice.org when I wanted to use the "format paintbrush" function.
The following image is a very similar picture for the mouse cursor I
had when the pointer was on the flash animation. When I moved the
pointer away from the flash image, the mouse cursor returned to a
normal arrow head.
My weird mouse cursor looked like this
I lived comfortably with this small problem for a long while but recently I decided the time fix this arrived.
Playing with themes did not work. Playing with /usr/share/icons and ~/.icons directories did not help.
After long search sessions with Google, I came across a hint suggesting
a solution to disappearing mouse cursors on Matrox support site.
Although my graphics card is not a Matrox (it is simple S3 Savage
card), I tried the hint and it worked for me as well.
I added the line
Option "HWCursor" "Off"
into the "Screen" section of my "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file (see below); restarted the X server by Alt-Ctrl-Bspace and vola...
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "S3 Inc.
VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]"
Monitor "PHILIPS 107T"
Option "HWCursor" "Off"
DefaultDepth 24
. . .
Endsection
I hope this small note helps others as well.