Xorg-6.8.x & NVIDIA GeForce2 MX: invisible cursor exposed

[Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D.]

I have Xorg-6.8.2 running under YDL-4.0.1 on a G4-Silver with an NVIDIA
GeForce2 MX video card.


Discussion
------------
The folks at the X.org foundation provide instructions on their CVS page
on how to build Xorg without removing or overwriting an existing
install:

	http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/CvsPage

This is a good thing.

I had looked at Xorg-6.8 earlier, but had encountered one problem that
prevented me from upgrading. There was something amiss with the cursor
bitmap that rendered the cursor invisible. The cursor was there and did
respond to the mouse. If I moved the mouse I could see "bit flickering"
so I could sort of guess where the cursor was. Mouse buttons also
worked. Xorg-6.8.2 had the same problem.  What to do???

A web search for the cause of the invisible cursor was not productive. 
I invested some time digesting the contents of the man page for the "nv"
driver that the GeForce2MX card uses. I then worked through the set of
available options until I discovered the source of the problem:

        Option "HWCursor" "boolean"
             Enable or disable the HW cursor.  Default: on.

The default setting for this Boolean device flag is "on", which is OK
for xorg-6.6, an XFree-4.3 [???] based hybrid that ships with YDL-4.0.1.
It is not "OK" for xorg-6.8.x. Once the hardware cursor is turned "off",
the previously invisible cursor magically appears.


-Joseph

-- 
joseph_sacco[at]comcast[dot]net