Comment 15 for bug 432179

In X you can't just turn off the cursor globally, and a lot of people seem to be expecting that to happen. You can only set a cursor bitmap on a specific window. What was happening in xsplash so far is that I set a blank cursor on the xsplash window, and if you ran xsplash from a terminal you would not see the cursor. But when you logged in you would see the cursor when it appeared to be over the xsplash window.

The problem is that we're starting xsplash before compiz starts, and for reasons I'm not going to describe in depth here we also initialize the X compositing overlay window. So right now when you've seen a cursor over the xsplash window, it's actually been because your mouse cursor is on the cow, not on xsplash. You'll still see a brief time where the cursor becomes visible and then invisible again, and that's when compiz starts and takes over the cow. Talking to a compiz developer, I believe there is no solution to that right now.