I am installing Gentoo on an old Averatec 3260 laptop. The install went very well except the touchpad/mouse cursor is invisible. The cursor moves, tracking the touchpad, or mouse, and the buttons work, but the cursor is not visible. First, I tried xfce4 and was unable to solve this within the xfce4 settings. Then, I tried LXDE to see if it behaves the same, and it does. This laptop uses the VIA KM400 unichrome graphics chip set so Xorg is using the openchrome driver. This laptop previously had Debian based distributions on it, most recently AntiX-13 which uses a 3.7 kernel, as does Gentoo. The AntiX live CD xorg.conf and synaptics.conf files produce the invisible cursor when substituted for the Gentoo versions of these files in Gentoo, but when the AntiX live CD is running, the cursor is visible, as it was when AntiX was installed. The AntiX version of Xorg uses earlier versions of openchrome, VESA and fbdev modules. Searching the Internet leads me to suspect a VGA problem but I disabled the VGA framebuffer IAW the Gentoo Xorg WIKI. Any suggestions would be very welcome. Thanks.

First, stable kernel in Gentoo is 3.10.25 - you should be using it.
Second, what is your VIDEO_CARDS variable set to?
Third, if you have native driver for your graphics you do not need VESA or fbdev, they can be useful for fallback, though.
Fourth, many open source Xorg graphics drivers use KMS nowadays and won't work without it.

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Thanks for the reply.
My error on the kernel, sorry. The Gentoo kernel is 3.10.25 whereas the AntiX kernel is 3.7.10.
Not sure what you mean by VIDEO_CARDS variable. In xorg.conf, Graphics Device Section, I used
Section "Device"
Identifier "any supported Openchrome chip"
Driver "openchrome"
.......
I get the same result with the xorg.conf file containing that section as with no xorg.conf file at all. Xorg created only 2 conf files in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and they are 10-evdev.conf and 50-synaptics.conf. I copied them to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
I emerged the modules openchrome, VESA and fbdev IAW the WIKI. VESA and fbdev are being unloaded according to Xorg.0.log.
KMS is being used according to Xorg.0.log.

Can you post the whole Xorg log in some pastebin site?

Done. Just opened an account at pastebin.com. The paste is called Xorg.log by kel_en. It is public.
This Xorg.log includes shutting down the X server at the end.
Thanks for your help.

Can you please post a direct link into pastebin? FYI, wgetpaste utility will give you a link no account required.

Maybe. Not sure how long it will take. I emerged wgetpastebin and it is not intuitive, nor is the help very useful. It will take some time to figure out how to use it, and then create the paste on a supported site. Thanks.

The paste can be seen here:
http://bpaste.net/show/181194
Thanks again for your help. I found an explanatory article for wgpaste and it is easy.

You should turn it on in kernel, it may be the reason of your cursor trouble.

Again, thanks for the reply. The changes that I made to the kernel had no effect. I still get these error messages in Xorg.log:

[ 483.604] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
[ 483.733] (EE) CHROME(0): [drm] Failed to open DRM device for pci:0000:01:00.0: No such file or directory
____________________________________________________________________________

This is the current kernel configuration omitting the pages that show no hardware framebuffers enabled:

<*> /dev/agpart (AGP Support) --->
<*> VIA chipset support

<*> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support --->[*] Allow to specify an EDID data set instead of probing for it


<*> Via unichrome video cards
______________________________________________________________-
The kernel sees the card and this is the lspci entry:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] (rev 01)
________________________________________________________________
This is the the relevant part of /etc/portage/make.conf:

INPUT_DEVICES="evdev synaptics"
VIDEO_CARDS="openchrome"
_______________________________

Since the driver is openchrome, I called the VIDEO_CARDS variable "openchrome". Should I change it to "via" or to "unichrome" and try that? I assume that change would require some sort of "world update".

Thanks again.

It may be your AGP is not VIA, I see you have AMD board.

I changed the /etc/portage/make.conf VIDEO_CARDS variable to "via openchrome" and then did an emerge --changed-use --deep @world which brought in about 18 new packages and rebuilt 2. Then, I found that the modules "via" and "drm" were not being loaded in spite of being listed in /etc/conf.d/modules. If I modprobe via, it loads and brings in drm. Then startx runs without the previous errors involving dri and drm, but has a new error which seems to be common to KM400/KN400 chipsets with the openchrome driver. The Xorg.log can be seen here:
http://bpaste.net/show/182008/

The cursor is still invisible.

Yes the processor is AMD. All of the agp options in the Kernel menu are enabled as modules which allows amd-k7-agp.ko or ati-agp.ko or amd64-agp.ko to be loaded instead of via-agp.ko, if the kernel desired. The processor is a mobile version based on the k7. Adding module amd-k7-agp does not make the cursor visible, nor change the way X loads. I did not remove the module via-agp because the system reported that it is still in use after I added amdk7-agp. I then removed via-agp from /etc/conf.d/modules and added amd-k7-agp but the system still loads the via-agp when booted. What do you suggest?

For some reason, I have to modprobe the via module after booting just like the amd-k7-agp module because it won't load automatically. Perhaps a conflict? I don't understand why.

Thanks for you help.

Do you have xorg.conf ?
FYI Xorg works best without it as long as drivers are open source.

No xorg.conf in either /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d or /usr/share/xorg.conf.d.
I tried to make an xorg.conf, without success, before I changed the VIDEO_CARDS variable in an effort to solve the two EE entries in Xorg.log. Thanks for the response.

I found the answer and have a visible cursor. I now have an xorg.conf file:

Thank you very much, Emerson.

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