Tales from the broken cursor
I said this thread would include rants, so… here is one… I hope it can help someone if they face this seemingly silly problem.
Virtual machines are quite a useful little tool when installing and using multiple operating systems quickly and without affecting what is already setup and, also, for avoiding the pesky, slow and still a little dangerous, partition resizing; so some of the distributions mentioned in the post above about the 4.0 installer script were installed, played with, tested and tweaked using virtual machines.
VirtualBox in this case… as much as I’ve used and loved VMWare for quite a while, their latest releases have been growing more and more awful and useless for my needs with each passing version; while VirtualBox, honestly quite nasty at times, has been growing better (until you want to mount an obscene amount of SCSI drives in a Windows 2000 VM… subst is your friend).
While testing some of the distributions mentioned in the post above about the 4.0 installer script update I came across an irritating problem: the mouse cursor never changed to my selected ones, staying as the image used by the host, if “Mouse integration” was enabled (making it a pain to resize windows), or downright disappeared, if “Mouse integration” was disabled (making the thing impossible to use with a GUI… for testing a GUI program :S )
I have a happy, non-transient machine with proper cursors… what was happening?
The first impulse was to blame the virtualization software, after all, even if both distributions are Arch based, they are different enough in some respects… so I switched the machine to VMWare… ooh… the same problem! Unlikely to be the virtualization, then…
Maybe it was the X server? (I want nothing to do with nor care for Wayland) So I made the X server congruent between my machine with a cursor and the one without… No dice either 
So, not the server, then…
uname -a
Oh… there’s an interesting difference! The machine with the working cursor is using a 6.12 kernel, while the broken one was using a 6.17 one!
So… time to switch kernels! (Cue the old 60’s Batman stinger and spinning transition here).
And lo’ the cursor was back! So… a kernel issue then.
If you are using Arch Linux or EndeavourOS with a recent install or update under a VM you’ll probably run into this issue too… the fastest and easiest way I found to fix it was to install the linux-lts kernel and switch the machine to use it (not really straightforward; but easy under Arch based distributions…): it is a 6.12 kernel.
Most Debian based distributions lag behind quite a bit; so they are unlikely to run into this… for the time being (I’m honestly not sure if Debian itself did suffer from this… I didn’t have a happy time with it, so I put it out of mind) and the Fedora portion of the script was there since the first version (it was, after all, inspired by a Fedora user looking for help), so I didn’t reinstall it.
I found another proposed solution here, after a while:
but it didn’t work for me and, also, that solution carries its own set of quirks…
Another solution was to change VirtualBox’s display adapter to VBoxSVGA for the guest; but the damned thing is stubborn and refuses to acknowledge my changes… I did say it could be nasty (and that little thing can annoy me to no end when I need changes to happen… perhaps I’ll rant another day about how to do it… sometimes…). I find it to be a really sad paradox that the more “user friendly” some software tries to be, the more obscure and infuriating it can get, seems to happen a lot these days.
Maybe this will help someone, somewhere, sometime.
EOR
