Since recently switching from the open source to the binary VIA Xserver, I always had an annoying gray bar near the upper left corner of my screen. It would go away by switching to a text mode framebuffer and back to X though.

One hack would have certainly been to automate that switching after X has started, but it turns out that this gray bar is actually a shadow of the text mode cursor… guess proper initialisation isn’t VIA’s strength or something?

So instead, I added the following line to my /etc/init.d/entrance script:

@@ -43,6 +43,7 @@ case "$1" in
                export PATH=`pam_getenv -l PATH`
        fi
        set -e
+       /usr/bin/setterm -cursor off>/dev/tty9
        $DAEMON
         fi
        echo "."

This turns off the text mode cursor. Seems to be working fine so far.