Arch Linux

Ale3.1sandro

Member

Registered: 2015-08-04

Posts: 12

Mouse cursor randomly (dis)appearing

Hello, I have a strange problem, strange because it appears randomly so I can not understand what causes it.

Sometimes, but not always, my mouse cursor does not appear when I start X. I use i3-wm, my .xinit is rather small and I have not configured the mouse in any xorg-conf files. It appears more or less 30% of the time. When it does not appear I can switch to tty2, do again startx and in this second X the mouse cursor appears always. Then I go back to the first X and I kill it. But if I kill the first X before opening the second, then sometimes works, sometimes not.

I really don't understand when and what is causing it and I do not know where it could be the problem. In any case, the problem is the cursor, the mouse work.

I hope someone has an idea of what could cause it or what I could try to do!

Here it is my .xinitrc

[feaver@arcibaldo ~]$ cat .xinitrc
xbindkeys
syndaemon -t -k -i 2 -d

# Enable zapping (C-A-<Bksp> kills X)
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

#Start i3 with log
echo "Starting at $(date)" > ~/.i3/logfile
exec /usr/bin/i3 -V -d all >> ~/.i3/logfile

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Mouse cursor randomly (dis)appearing

I could only guess, that syndaemon doesn't like being called as a daemon from the xinitrc. Try dropping the -d and push it to the background with &.

Ale3.1sandro

Member

Registered: 2015-08-04

Posts: 12

Re: Mouse cursor randomly (dis)appearing

Thanks for the answer but no, I can remove the syndaemon line and it does not change anything.

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Mouse cursor randomly (dis)appearing

Then let's dig deeper. What kind of mouse do you have? Post your lsusb. Have you tried a different USB port? Do you have any kind of energy management running or configured, that might decide to turn off or power down a USB port? Have you tried a different mouse, to rule out a hardware problem?

Ale3.1sandro

Member

Registered: 2015-08-04

Posts: 12

Re: Mouse cursor randomly (dis)appearing

Good, thanks! I have a laptop and the problem occurs with the usb-mouse and without, with only the trackpad. So it is not a problem of usb-ports.

I do not use any power-management tool. The only thing I used, was powertop to change a bit the configurations. Could that be the cause? It would surprise me. If I remember correctly I had this problem before I installed powertop.

In any case I can always click on things. So this is not an hardware problem. It is only that the cursor sometimes is invisible.

Are there log-files that could give me some information about what is happening?