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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020516 Description of problem: The mouse pointer disappeared after installing RH 7.3. It worked, but was invisible. A quick usenet search turned up a work-around - add `Option "sw_cursor"' to the `Device' section of the XF86Config-4 file. I tried `Option "hw_cursor"' as well but this produced the same invisible cursor, so I am unsure whether to catagorize this as a video driver bug or an anaconda misconfiguration, but an anaconda fix should be sufficient to fix the problem for most people, even if it isn't optimal. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1.Update to RH 7.3 2.Run Gnome. 3. Actual Results: Mouse pointer was not visable. Expected Results: Mouse pointer should be visable. Additional info: I am running RH 7.3 on a Sony Vaio PCG-XG18. The video card is a NeoMagic 256XL+ and my XF86Config-4 was configured to use the neomagic driver.
This problem only occurs when upgrading from a previous release to Red Hat Linux 7.3 using neomagic chipsets. The current video driver has messed up hardware cursor support. If a fresh OS install is done instead of an upgrade, then the right thing happens, and the software cursor is configured. Also, if you manually run Xconfigurator post-upgrade, the card will be configured properly. The problem only occurs when using an old config file with the new X. Short of nasty card specific kludges/hacks, there is no way to cleanly detect these sort of situations and work around them. That is also magnified by the fact the problem wasn't known until after 7.3 was released. So, for now, the official solution is to rerun Xconfigurator. Closing as WORKSFORME since bugzilla doesn't really have a decent resolution type for this particular kind of solution/workaround.
One thing I wasn't clear about in the above, is the actual way the problem occurs. Here is what happens - during an upgrade, if you do not reconfigure XFree86, then the old config file is left intact. If the old configuration for any reason is incompatible with the new X, or if the new X requires any specific config changes for your particular hardware, then it may not function correctly until you reconfigure with Xconfigurator. Again, there's no way to automatically detect these types of scenarios unfortunately. The good thing though, is that this type of problem is very very rare, so it isn't a major issue.