No mouse cursor in {flux|open}box until an application is opened

[Steven I Usdansky]

--- On Fri, 11/28/08, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote:

> From: Scott Robbins <scottro at 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 at 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.