--- On Fri, 11/28/08, Scott Robbins <scottro(a)nyc.rr.com> wrote:
From: Scott Robbins <scottro(a)nyc.rr.com>
Subject: No mouse cursor in {flux|open}box until an application is opened
To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases"
<fedora-test-list(a)redhat.com>
Date: Friday, November 28, 2008, 6:59 PM
A recent fresh install of F10 from DVD seemed normal enough.
Gnome and
KDE boot normally, everything is fine.
However, I prefer fluxbox. I installed it afterwards, but
when I type
startx, there is no mouse cursor. This is on an Acer
Aspire 4720z,
which uses the synaptics driver. The older Fedora versions
have that
entry in xorg.conf on this machine. The later Rawhide test
installs
don't have an xorg.conf, of course, but it worked fine
with them as
well.
If I right click on the desktop, a context menu opens,
which is normal
behavior. However, still no cursor. I can navigate the
menu with the
invisible cursor.
Now, when I open an application, xterm, firefox or
whatever, if I drag
the mouse back and forth into the application once or twice
and left
click, a cursor appears.
That's in fluxbox.
In openbox, the same behavior occurs with an xterm.
However, if I open
a gtk app, such as firefox or gnome-terminal (again, I can
open them by
left clicking the as yet invisible mouse) the cursor just
appears,
usually with that little blue moving circle that one sees
when first
logging into a Gnome desktop.
Putting a working rawhide install's xorg.conf in there
didn't help.
Dmesg and Xorg logs show the same thing as a working
installation's
logs, seeing a synaptics mouse on boot and upon starting
xorg, Mac mouse
emulation.
Other things I've tried, after googling and seeing
various mouse
problems--(though none were desktop specific, in those
cases, the poster
seemed to not have a mouse at all) were removing rhgb quiet
from the
grub line (apparently helps with some nvidia cards), adding
HWCursor off
to xorg.conf, installing config-system-display and using
it. None of
these help.
It's more an amusing inconvenience than disaster,
since, A) the cursor
does appear after anything is opened, and B) the whole
reason I prefer
the *box WM's is because they enable to do almost
everything without the
mouse.
I was able to duplicate this on two test installs, but
I've only tried
on this one machine, an Acer 4720z, which has frequently
given me Just
Me(TM) problems.
Using gpm also works without problem, so the system is
seeing the mouse,
Gnome and KDE see the mouse, it's just that the *box
WM's seem to not
notice there's a mouse till an application opens.
Has anyone run into something like this? I'm not sure
what Gnome and
KDE are doing that fluxbox isn't in this case.
Thanks for any input.
I also tried, on the second test install, upgrading the
existing F10
releaes to today's rawhide, but there was no change.
--
Scott Robbins
Saw the same problem with the FC10-PR using openbox under LXDE. I
worked around the problem by modifying my session startup file to open a terminal window.