Ubuntu: mouse pointer is randomly disappearing
December 20th, 2007
Problem:
Lately you have noticed that your mouse pointer disappears occasionally, or flickers while you move it along the screen, in a fairly random fashion. You may have also noticed that this is mostly happening while Firefox is in the process of loading a page. Sometimes you may also get stuck with an animated mouse pointer, which is fixed only by restarting the X windows system.
Cause:
A bug in the Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin of CompizFusion.
Solution:
Go to System → Preferences → Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. Click on Enhanced Zoom Desktop and then select the Mouse Behavior tab. Make sure that you have not checked the options Scale the mouse pointer and Hide original mouse pointer. (Yes, you will have to live without those two cool features if you want to get rid of the missing mouse pointer problem). Close the settings manager and restart X.
Lately you have noticed that your mouse pointer disappears occasionally, or flickers while you move it along the screen, in a fairly random fashion. You may have also noticed that this is mostly happening while Firefox is in the process of loading a page. Sometimes you may also get stuck with an animated mouse pointer, which is fixed only by restarting the X windows system.
Cause:
A bug in the Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin of CompizFusion.
Solution:
Go to System → Preferences → Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. Click on Enhanced Zoom Desktop and then select the Mouse Behavior tab. Make sure that you have not checked the options Scale the mouse pointer and Hide original mouse pointer. (Yes, you will have to live without those two cool features if you want to get rid of the missing mouse pointer problem). Close the settings manager and restart X.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:03 pm Thanks!
PS. X-Window, without the ending "s"
April 4th, 2009 at 10:33 pm Thanks so much, I really couldn't figure out what was causing it. :)
April 25th, 2009 at 1:37 pm Thank you, Giannis, I couldn't figure out this problem until I read your post.
But now when I zoom desktop, the pointer goes to the top left corner of the screen and won't move. So frustrating!
November 27th, 2009 at 1:14 am Thank you. I've been a Linux convert for a while now and just recently enabled those features but didn't put two and two together.
Cheers
February 25th, 2010 at 12:38 am I have found that I need both options, because when I want to work on the zoomed desktop, that is I want to actually click something, the unscaled mouse pointer is shown in a different place than the click will be registered. Even if I try to read a web page, I might have problems to click a link or to grab the scroll bar.
Because I need desktop zoom often, and it is annoying that with some programs like Seamonkey the mouse pointer disappears when the browser is active, I have figured out a work around which at least softens this annoying side effect a little bit:
If you zoom into the desktop, a little step into the zoom is already enough, than the mouse pointer is drawn more stable and won't vanish. Since you can define the zoom steps, just choose a small stepping size if you want to have, say, only a few pixels of the screen to get out of sight.
By the way, I have put the zoom in and zoom out on my third mouse buttons left and right side click, it works great! I'm zooming all the time! :-)
April 29th, 2010 at 3:07 pm Thx alot, that's helped me. It was very annoying
And u do NOT have to uncheck the 'scale mouse pointer'.
ONLY uncheck the 'hide mouse pointer'.
The problem now is when u zoom in, a scaled pointer is shows AND the original pointer is ALSO visible, but i cal live with this anyway :)