[SOLVED partially] mouse pointer "missing" on login screen

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, May 8, 2022 at 11:36 AM Jon LaBadie <ubu at labadie.us> wrote:

> On Sat, May 07, 2022 at 06:54:32PM -0700, Tom Mitchell wrote:
> >On Sat, May 7, 2022 at 2:53 PM <ubuntu at howorth.org.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >> ubu at labadie.us wrote:
> >> > On Fri, May 06, 2022 at 03:15:02PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> >...
> >> > > On the login and password entry screens I'm missing the
> >> > > icon for the mouse pointer.  Instead I have a semi-opaque
> >> > > white square.  Functional, but not very accurate.
> >....
> >> > I read that gdm uses the "adwaita" icon&cursor themes by
> >> > default.  So I looked into the adwaita packages available:
> >> >
> >> > $ apt list 'adwaita-icon-theme*'
> >> > Listing... Done
> >> > adwaita-icon-theme/jammy,now 41.0-1ubuntu1 all [installed,automatic]
> >> > adwaita-icon-theme-full/jammy,now 41.0-1ubuntu1 all [installed]
> >...
> >> > The full version of adwaita, adwaita-icon-theme-full, was not
> >> > installed, only the basic version, adwaita-icon-theme.
> >> >
> >> > I installed the full version and the login screen mouse pointers
> >> > appeared.
> >....
> >> Kudos for solving the problem and for the thorough testing :)
> >
> >Yes Kudos.
> >This has been a forever "feature" that I just lived with.
> >I did look in the log files and saw no "missing something" hint.
> >I lived with a white block "pointer" but at least one needs to
> >be included in adwaita-icon-theme perhaps a "star" or something functional
> >for login to not have an identical file duplicated in two packages.
> >
> >I have upgraded in place multiple times so it might be an update thing
> >and not a clean install topic.
> >
> >Thank you.
> >
>
> Follow-up:
>
> My install was a to new hardware, not an upgrade.
>
> I have filed a bug report via launchpad.  I'm new to
> Ubuntu and hope this was the correct venue.
>
> More specifics on the needed files.  The two adwaita-icon-theme
> packages seem to have no common ordinary files.  Both install
> mostly (entirely?) into /usr/share/icon/Adwaita.  The automatically
> installed "basic" package has about 1900 icons, the "full" package
> adds about 4100 more.
>
> Only the "full" packages includes a "Adwaita/cursors" directory.
>
> If trying for a minimal work around, two files under "cursors" are
> needed, "left_ptr" and "xterm".  The gdm mouse pointer changes to
> the xterm vertical bar inside the login name and password fields.
>
> There are also several sym-links to these cursor files, "arrow",
> "default", and "top_left_arrow" linked to "left_ptr" and "text"
> linked to "xterm".  I didn't explore which name gdm looks for.
>

I was curious about how this could happen, so I searched "upstream" to
Debian, and discovered there's no "-full" package there. Only one package
with everything:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/adwaita-icon-theme

So I found the source package page in Ubuntu

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adwaita-icon-theme/

and then the listing for a particular version (I picked Jammy)

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adwaita-icon-theme/41.0-1ubuntu1

at the bottom of that page you can see that Ubuntu splits the Debian source
into two binary packages, because:

 > This package only contains a small subset of the original GNOME icons
 > which are not provided by the Humanity icon theme, to avoid installing
 > many duplicated icons. Please install adwaita-icon-theme-full if you
 > want the full set.

So fixing the dependency on Ubuntu might either recommend the
humanity-icon-theme package

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/humanity-icon-theme

OR further touching up the Ubuntu .deb to make sure the pointers exist in
whatever gets installed.
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