Problem with mouse cursor

Support & Help Requests
1

Hi all! I have this problem with the mouse cursor. It randomly (or so it seems) changes from a pointed arrow into a rather large square. I have a twoo screen setup. On the one screen, it appears as a large square with hairline green vertical lines. On the other screen it sometimes appears the same, somitimes turnes into a black square and now has turned transparant. :frowning: Rebooting helps, but recently the problem seems to be reappearing more frequently. Can someone point me towards an understanding of what is happening (possibly the GPU???)? And, if possible, what I can do about it (if it is not the GPU). Thanks in advance!

2

Wow, this one gives me a flashback to the days of Red Hat 8.0 and the Cirrus Logic CL5446 graphics chip. :slightly_smiling_face:

This one sounds a lot like a GPU driver bug. Please tell me what your hardware is. Hint: You can run the lshw command in a terminal window; that usually gives pretty good hardware listings. It doesn't give accurate listings on my ancient Pentium III machine right here with an 8MB ATI 3D Rage Pro graphics chip, however, but almost anything newer than that should show useful information in lshw output.

3

Hi, Gordon. Thanks for your reply. I suspect indeed that there is a problem with the GPU. I don't thing its the driver, though, because this setup has functioned flawlessly for the past 10 years. Anyway, this is the relevant output of the command 'lshw' you asked for:

   *-pci:1
         description: PCI bridge
         product: 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 3
         vendor: Intel Corporation
         physical id: 3
         bus info: pci@0000:00:03.0
         version: 13
         width: 32 bits
         clock: 33MHz
         capabilities: pci msi pciexpress pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list
         configuration: driver=pcieport
         resources: irq:25 ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fa000000-fa0fffff ioport:e0000000(size=268435456)
       *-display
            description: VGA compatible controller
            product: RV610 [Radeon HD 2400 PRO]
            vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
            physical id: 0
            bus info: pci@0000:0f:00.0
            version: 00
            width: 64 bits
            clock: 33MHz
            capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
            configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
            resources: irq:43 memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:fa000000-fa00ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:c0000-dffff
       *-multimedia
            description: Audio device
            product: RV610 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 2350 PRO / 2400 PRO/XT / HD 3410]
            vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
            physical id: 0.1
            bus info: pci@0000:0f:00.1
            version: 00
            width: 64 bits
            clock: 33MHz
            capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list
            configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0
            resources: irq:46 memory:fa010000-fa013fff

Perhaps it is just time for me to change the videocard. Not the end of the world, right?

Thanks again for you interest!

1 Like
4

As you can see (since I'm still using a 1999 ATI 3D Rage Pro) I'm not particularly in favor of changing hardware like that for no good reason. Are you sure you didn't just upgrade Ubuntu MATE or install some new software? In the case of the Cirrus Logic chip I'm talking about, it was just a buggy driver.

And wait a second! Ubuntu MATE has not existed for 10 years! By definition you had to have upgraded.