Comment 6 for bug 614176

I have a similar problem running Ubuntu Meerkat on an old Dell Latitude D500 that uses Intel GMA 855 graphics hardware. This problem began for me after doing an update a few days ago, and persists after this morning's kernel update. Everything works normally as before, except that I cannot draw a mouse cursor to save my life if the system boots normally. I tried playing with xorg.conf, using vesa driver instead of the default, explicitly turning on the SWCursor, etc. The only thing I found that restores the cursor is choosing Recovery in the Grub menu and then coming up using failsafeX. However, if I copy xorg.conf.failsafe over to xorg.conf and then come up normally - that still does not work.

Strangely when booting normally, even splash works! Just ... no cursor.

I also tried the "sudo lshw -c display" trick suggested in bug #601172, but that hung my system like a horse.