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Re: How to fix intermittently disappearing mouse pointer ?



On Tue, 5 Aug 2014 22:58:18 +0900
Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 10:51 PM, Steve Litt
> <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> > I've googled this several times, but none of what I saw worked or
> > seemed relevant. The following seemed the most relevant, but turned
> > out not to be helpful:
> >
> > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137080
> >
> > I have Wheezy running Openbox (I'm not sure how to detect Openbox's
> > version, but I installed it normally with apt-get). I'm *not*
> > running unclutter. Sometimes, my mouse pointer disappears when the
> > mouse pointer comes to rest on anything with popup text, which is
> > very obstructive (if you've ever worked on a computer that does
> > this, you know what I mean).
> >
> > Often, this symptom doesn't happen for the first few minutes after
> > starting X, but then later does. It appears not to happen in Xfce,
> > but I didn't test Xfce for hours, so I can't be sure.
> 
> Happens with my XFCE. (Wheezy.)
> 
> > It appears not to
> > happen with another user (I made user test), but once again, I
> > didn't test user test for hours. I even copied all files
> > from /home/slitt to /home/test, and the symptom didn't appear, and
> > then when I went back to /home/test the symptom disappeared, for at
> > least a few minutes.
> >
> > I suspect, for not much of a reason, that the symptom is triggered
> > when the screen changes, either because it times out and goes
> > blank, or because I ran a Youtube movie full screen. Due to the
> > time it takes to close everything, log out, run startx, and try
> > again, this intermittent has been slow to investigate.
> >
> > Intermittents are slow to solve because diagnostic tests are
> > inconclusive. Eventually I'll nail this thing, but if any of you has
> > had experience with this problem and remembers the solution, you
> > could cut a lot of time off my investigation.
> 
> This isn't even intermittent. X11 is trying to do too much, that's
> all. That means it doesn't have time to keep the pointer updated.

This is good information, Joel. Thanks for confirming it isn't Openbox
only!

So my next question is this: How have you reduced your X11 task
load to eliminate the symptom? And how would one look at the relative
weight of tasks X11 is doing?

By the way, according to htop, my X11 is using 0% CPU, 0.5% memory, and
is invoked as follows:

====================================================
/usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp :0 -auth /tmp/serverauth.Lo8khjMuIc
====================================================

Does anything in the preceding look wrong? Should X be listening on
tcp? Any other obvious problems?

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance


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