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I have been experiencing a problem with the mouse pointer on a system running Ubuntu 16.10.

When the mouse is moved to the left edge of the screen, the pointer graphic will freeze a short distance away from the left edge, usually between 10 and 50 pixels away, and will not move again until the mouse is moved to the right slightly.

The actual mouse coordinates must still be updating as if the mouse is moved towards the top-left of the screen, the tooltips for any launcher icons appear in turn as if the mouse pointer is passing over them. When the mouse is then moved slightly to the right, the frozen pointer will suddenly jump to wherever the mouse really was pointing.

I observed this behaviour in standard Ubuntu and Xubuntu 16.10. When I reinstalled with 16.04 LTS, the problem went away.

This isn't related to sticky edges, as it made no difference if I enabled or disabled that setting.

Has anyone else had this issue and determined the cause, or a solution?

TheJase
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2 Answers2

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I was experiencing some problems with my pointer as well. In my case, the pointer is there, but is not working properly, since it needs to be not on the link/folder/file... but above it.

It the past, trying to look for info about this issue, I discovered that many other users upgrading to ubuntu 16.10, started to experience an issue with the mouse pointer disappearing, which also happened to me sometimes.

I read in this Ubuntu Forums post that resetting unity settings would help

Install unity-tweak-tool

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Then do a reset via:

unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

It worked for me, and my pointer stopped disappearing.

Zanna
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siverpoint
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    Please include the steps from the link here – Zanna Feb 13 '17 at 23:03
  • Sorry about that, still learning the forum reply rules ;) – siverpoint Feb 15 '17 at 11:26
  • Thanks for fixing. Actually I have to say, because it's important, Ask Ubuntu isn't a forum ;) I can't upvote your answer because I can't verify it should work for the OP, whose case is a little different. I hope someone else can do so. – Zanna Feb 15 '17 at 11:40
  • Got the proper reply format now. Thanx again for your ciber-kindness – siverpoint Feb 16 '17 at 12:09
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This is apparently a workaround to a nasty bug in the intel code on the Cherry Trail drivers in Linux which would otherwise cause the system to freeze.

So if you are running on that architecture this is why. There is a workaround.

Create/edit a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and put in the following:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel"
    Driver "intel"
EndSection

Then logout or reboot. The freezing will stop when you've logged back in, but you'll get a flickering mouse pointer instead. Up to you which is worse.

Richard Brooklyn
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