Ubuntu

Invisible mouse pointer with AMD eGPU on 23.10

Asked by Adam Cherrett

I am using an Intel NUC12WSK and an AMD 6800XT card in a Razer Core X eGPU housing connected via thunderbolt.

This has been working fine with Ubuntu 23.04, both with and without the external GPU. I have just upgraded to 23.10 by doing a clean install (the upgrade method failed due to some packages I couldn't identify).

Everything is fine without the eGPU - the desktop functions perfectly using the integrated graphics; When I connect the eGPU, everything is almost fine. The GPU is identified, and is active when DRI_PRIME=1 - the only thing is that there is no mouse pointer visible in the desktop or games. The mouse functions fine (and I can use the left-Ctrl to locate the pointer, which moves around the screen and selects things as normal). But I have not found a way to make the pointer visible.

One last note: the connection to the monitor is HDMI from the graphics card output (because the GPU is not recognised when I plug the HDMI into the output on the base machine).

Any help would be much appreciated!

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Adam Cherrett
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

If you are using Wayland, try switching to Xorg

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Adam Cherrett (adamcherrett) said : 		#2

Thanks for the suggestion. It didn't solve the problem, but has led me to a partial solution/workaround.

Switching to Xorg prevented the machine from booting into any graphic environment, and as it was a fresh install I just reinstalled - and it worked fine. Unfortunately, that installation deleted my /home partition, for reasons I am not aware of - so I reinstalled from scratch again - but that time it was back to the invisible mouse pointer.

In all, I had to do 7 fresh reinstalls. Each one behaved slightly differently. Sometimes it would just be the mouse pointer, sometimes it would start up into a setup wizard on a different window manager, then crash halfway through setup. Sometimes it would have assigned me a username and password which were different from what I had chosen. I am a bit surprised how doing a fresh install on identical hardware can give non-deterministic and different results each time.

Anyway, now I have an installation which has no visible mouse pointer on boot, but if I log out and in again, the mouse pointer appears. I guess that's a sort of workaround / resolution, but it is not very satisfying that the solution is to keep reinstalling the operating system until you randomly get an installation which nearly works.