Previously, I wrote about a rather serious bug in Debian 6, which prevented the mouse pointer to appear in any X session. However, upon a sleep or hibernation and recovery the pointer came back. As now I wanted to use the laptop which was affected by this issue, I had to look into the solution as well, as there is nothing on how to resolve this on the bugtracker page. Luckily enough I found a rather good point on another page. The main point is that according to the bugtracker, the Intel video driver is already fixed in the proposed update 2.6.32-32 but it cannot be moved to the mainline. For x86, however, it works just fine so that we can install it. To do so, add two lines to the end of the /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian squeeze-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian squeeze-proposed-updates main
contrib non-free
The domain name can be replaced to match the earlier entries in sources.list. Then as root, simply issue:
root@gxa01:~# apt-get update
root@gxa01:~# apt-get upgrade
The upgradable packages will be shown and most likely some additional packages such as libc, and apt itself will be upgraded. Then reboot, and enjoy your system with a mouse :)
