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I've been trying to find a solution to this all day but I'm having no joy.

I have a Dual Monitor setup for my Lenovo B50-45 running Ubuntu. Both monitors are identical (Philips 274E). One is attached via HDMI and the other is via VGA.

I have a strange situation where after a couple of hours use, the mouse cursor on the VGA monitor changes to what looks like 5 dots with downwards pointing arrows beside them (see this picture). I had to take a photo with my phone as when I took a screen shot that includes the pointer, it showed as a normal pointer icon. I've no idea exactly what causes it to change.

Anyone any idea how I can fix this without having to restart the computer (which fixes it)?

Edit 1: Well today the mouse icon on the HDMI monitor changed while the VGA monitor is fine. I have another question here that appears to be related to this issue but unusually, the system has not slowed down when the HDMI icon changed. No idea what's going on but it appears to be related to the AMD graphics driver

Edit 2: I'm finding the only solution is to change to the Xorg driver, restart the machine, change back to fglrx and restart the machine. If I don't do this then when I restart the machine I get these awful blocky graphics. I'm putting the issue down to AMD's buggy proprietory driver fglrx. Very frustrating. Might have to start using a different machine with the dual monitors

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2 Answers 2

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The solution is to move the mouse pointer between the two monitors repeatedly till this weird looking pointer is gone . Usually, within 2-6 quick transitions of mouse pointer between the monitor fixes it. And, no need to restart the computer. It is in fact related to the buggy AMD driver.

PS- Some nVidia drivers also have shown such behavior. This behavior has also been observed in Windows platform and other OSs.

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  • I'll give that a go next time it happens which no doubt will be today
    – Al D
    May 17, 2016 at 8:24
  • Issue just happened there and unfortunately your solution is not working. Have updated my question with the only way I'm able to fix
    – Al D
    May 17, 2016 at 13:09
  • It happens with me too and it is just fixed by moving mouse between screens repeatedly. I do not have any other solution to it at this moment.
    – ankit7540
    May 17, 2016 at 13:44
  • This issue occurs once or twice in a week or so and it is solved as I have mentioned above. Btw, i do not use fglrx. When I tried to install it, there was a warning for not correct driver. And I did not install it. Everything else with my display is okay !
    – ankit7540
    May 17, 2016 at 13:54
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    So I re-installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and now the open source driver is detecting the dual monitors and it's working perfectly. I think the problem may have been related to me restoring an image made from a different machine to this one. I should have just started fresh
    – Al D
    May 26, 2016 at 8:27
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To sort this issue (and the related issue in this question), I re-installed Ubuntu 14.04. When I did this, the open source graphics driver automatically recognised the dual monitors and the laptop has been working like a dream since.

I guess the problem was with the proprietary AMD drivers which seem to be buggy as hell.

Thanks to all for the assistance

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