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floatingpurr
Asked: 2016-09-14 02:13:38 +0800 CST

Mouse pointer disappears in Ubuntu 16.04

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I've just installed Ubuntu desktop 16.04 (x64) on ASUS k501U. Sometimes (not always), my mouse pointer disappears after login. I tried some solutions like Ctrl+Alt+F1 and Ctrl+Alt+F7 but they did not fix the problem. After I restart, mouse usually appears again.

It's quite an annoying issue, is there a way to fix?

16.04

11 Answers

  1. have the same problem after upgrading to 16.04. Often the mouse pointer will disappear. I found a way to get round this by restarting lightdm:

    sudo service lightdm restart

    but it's not a fix solution, since each time I have to type the command again.

    So I changed lightdm to gdm:

    sudo apt-get install gdm
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  2. This fixed for me on Ubuntu 19.04:

    gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor active false
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  3. On my laptop running Ubuntu 16.04, the mouse pointer disappeared frequently.

    My problem was: The mouse pointer seemed to disappear when I moved to the right side of the screen. It then appeared after say 3 to 5 seconds after moving the mouse up, down, left, right. This was quite annoying when doing work on the computer.

    The solution was:

    Click Dash (upper left corner) and type "system settings". Click "System Settings", then All Settings > Displays If its as of my case, you will see a box call Unknown Display to the left of Built in Display in a big box with grey background

    Click on unknown display and de-activate it by turning off the button just below the grey box.

    I found the answer here (Thanks to Justin Samuel!).

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  4. In my case none of the above works. The mouse disappears because of enabling coolbits on a .deb installed Nvidia graphics drivers.

    The issue seems to work on a clean Lubuntu/ubuntu install installing the drivers from the .run file instead.

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  5. Just shake your mouse, it will appear again. You can repeat this process each time your mouse disappears. This fix will the problem!

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  6. In my case one of the above worked fine for a while (I will try to look up where I left the fix, it's been a while since I applied it), but nowadays things are a bit hectic and the cursor disappears say in 20% of the cases.

    A sign out/re-login attempt sometimes helps in these cases. (Obviously not meant to be a fix/answer, just a suggestion for cases when in need of a quick temporary workaround.)

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  7. My mouse was disappearing on the login screen on my laptop and after trying all the answers here (and elsewhere) I plugged in a USB mouse and the mouse showed up again and worked when using the USB mouse (but the trackpad still wouldn't work). To get the trackpad working again I had to restart WHILE the USB mouse was plugged in. Now I'm back to normal.

    No idea why this worked... I'm on Ubuntu 16.04, and all of the terminal commands I ran showed the trackpad as expected.

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  8. I just pressed Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T and the pointer re-appeared. I'll have to try it again before I know if its just a coincidence as it re-appears by itself sometimes.

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  9. Mouse cursor disappear should be some bugs of the mouse support service in Ubuntu.
    I installed mouse service "gpm" in my Ubuntu server 20.04 on VirtualBox. Mouse cursor disappears frequently in Ubuntu terminal when I switch between VirtualBox and windows 10.
    Other than rebooting VM, my lightweight solution is to stop the mouse support service "gpm" and restart it again as below:

    sudo gpm -k                                  //stop gpm
sudo gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t exps2         //restart gpm

    There should be similar mouse support service for Ubuntu Desktop which can be stopped and restarted as a lightweight solution.

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  10. On VMWare, it was a Unity mode that caused my problem. Under the player menu is a Unity option. I clicked the Unity button and it restored by cursor.

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