Xubuntu 14.04.x Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) EOL and disappearing mouse cursor

Xubuntu 14.04.x Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) EOL and disappearing mouse cursor

It may surprise many people but I run Linux at home. I actually ran CentOS for a number of years as a desktop / server and then moved to Xubuntu around 2009, and have 2 laptops running it in various versions and flavours since. Let me start this by saying I heart xubuntu.

Around a month and a half ago I received a popup in Xubuntu 14.04 stating that my HWE stack was going to stop receiving updates for the kernel and graphics stack. A wiki article stated it should be fine to update to the xenial stack. Sounds critical and I responded with enough due diligence to believe my primary home laptop would upgrade fine.. in the process my intel video drivers got groggy and would cause the mouse cursor to disappear whenever (every time) I returned from sleep / a locked screen.

Pre-HWE EOL  

I've been running Xubuntu 14.04 x64 as a my primary machine for a long while. Developer tools, docker, java, lamp, virtual boxes etc. Intel video. Nothing fancy.
  

I upgraded after reading through the mentioned article and getting the warnings as expected

 sudo lsb_release -d
 hwe-support-status --show-replacements
 hwe-support-status --show-all-unsupported

I was running the relevant kernel, followed the steps to upgrade, not reinstall from scratch. My machine kept going but noticed that my cursor would disappear when unlocking from the light locker. I was kinda busy and didn't want to fix so found the common fix which is change from vt1 to vt7. 

I wish I'd taken more notes, but appears that I was bumped from a 3.13 to a 4.2 Kernel. I think I was somewhere refered to this and installed everything as per the 14.04 Desktop step. 

Now what's worse is that I had taken the other machine last week and performed a fresh install of Xubuntu 14.04.5 on it and this happens. New install or upgrade, same issue. In that instance I went and re-installed Xubuntu 14.04.1 and my cursor comes back as I'd expect so it's a new bug.

Getting my cursor back

Today I traced through a couple of articles and bug trackers and found that I was not alone. Note that this is still happening in xubuntu 16.04 which mentions the following under known issues on the release notes page, as at this date - "When returning from lock, the cursor disappears on the desktop, you can bring the cursor back with Ctrl+Alt+F1 followed by Ctrl+Alt+F7"

Now I want my wife to use my laptop for a specific purpose under a standard desktop users - can you image that discussion with someone who doesn't use linux or worse is not used to 30 keyboard shortcuts after a login. A poor, annoying workaround kept me going but not suitable.

Where else is this happening? 

Here. Every other workaround there is great, if you don't have to explain it.

Note I'd tried restarting lightdm, it kills your workspace and not suitable. Installing gdm? I gave that a spin earlier, do not do it. It killed my notifications bar, panel shortcuts etc. 

I quickly uninstalled gdm and purged/reinstalled light-locker. 

  sudo apt-get remove gdm
  sudo apt-get remove light-locker
  sudo apt-get purge light-locker
  sudo apt-get install light-locker

Man is it pretty in comparison. My Indicator plugins and panels loaded properly as I hoped too.

Ubuntu Bug Ticket - same workarounds mentioned and I noted that it was fixed in xserver-xorg-video-intel in Xenial. 

So I thought I'd just upgrade that since I'd installed the Xenial packages as per the HWE EOL wiki. 

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video*

When I tried I saw that some dependencies would not be met. So I tried to reinstall all of it 

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-lts-xenial xserver-xorg-core-lts-xenial xserver-xorg-lts-xenial xserver-xorg-video-all-lts-xenial xserver-xorg-input-all-lts-xenial libwayland-egl1-mesa-lts-xenial 

I shouldn't have done this, because I got a new 4.4.0.59 kernel and then my /boot proceed to run out of space - fixed that and retried. All appeared OK and I tried to lock and unlock - cursor continued to disappear.

I then decided to reboot and try after that. Kernel panic ensued and thankfully my 3.13 kernel was still available. So I booted with the 3.13 kernel, and by then was pretty mad. I forced trusty back

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-lts-trusty xserver-xorg-core-lts-trusty xserver-xorg-lts-trusty xserver-xorg-video-all-lts-trusty xserver-xorg-input-all-lts-trusty libwayland-egl1-mesa-lts-trusty

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-generic-lts-trusty

 After that I changed my grub config to use the old 3.13 kernel as default and had to hack the defaults to not use the 4.4 Kernel

sudo nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_DEFAULT="Advanced options for Ubuntu>Ubuntu, with Linux 3.13.0-107-generic"
sudo update-grub

Rebooted, logged in and out and surprise - my mouse cursor is back.

Of course checking the HWE I seem to be covered but I'm sure I've broken something, and an apt-get update later will probably bring some pain.

hwe-support-status --verbose
Your Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) is supported until April 2019.

This issue actually shouldn't be happening, in my opinion those release notes and ticket should be resolved by now. The lesson here is always test upgrades somewhere else before you play on your primary machine.

@quintes