An interesting note about your X cursor if you're not using a theme

dav7 · 2008-12-16 11:01:26

Storyline/background

Some time ago I had a few various issues with my fonts in X11; in particular, a certain font wasn't loading properly. So I more or less gave up on it until last night, when I decided to get everything sorted out and fix it up.

So I started out by reorganizing my fonts, but that failed: I accidentally ran 'rm -rf *' in my 75dpi folder instead of 'fonts.*'; urxvt suddenly wouldn't start unless I passed a fully qualified X font identifier to it since the server-inbuilt hardcoded reference to "fixed" had broken. So that was that.

So, after removing every single font I'd installed through pacman today, I methodically went through and reorganized all my user-installed fonts into their own, non-insane, non-messy directories, zipped up and removed some old font backup/archive folders, then reinstalled all my "system" fonts. After reinstalling, urxvt now started up without "help", thankfully. And everything looked pretty good.

The main point

And that was that, except for one small thing: my cursor was weird. It looked like the default KDE 3.x cursor. I couldn't explain it. I asked in #archlinux but they thought it was a theming issue and refered me to /usr/share/icons and modifying .Xdefaults with Xcursor.theme and so on. But I'd learned somewhere (probably from reading some sourcecode, among other things ) that X cursors are actually fonts. So I was almost certain that I was up against something font-related here.

And I was right: the following image isn't pretty, but it proves my point quite well. There is indeed a 'cursor' font (xlsfonts | grep cursor will return one or more lines of "cursor") and the X server uses it to display fonts on request. Don't ask me why it does that when there's /usr/include/X11/bitmaps containing all the cursor files as well, as XBMs...

But anyway. Here's xfontsel -fn cursor:

I've put a red square around the cursor in question, so you know for sure what I'm talking about; this is the cursor the system had upgraded to. /usr/share/fonts/misc/cursor.pcf.gz owned by xorg-fonts-misc, 1.0-0.3, if you want to explicitly grab it right now or ensure your system avoids it.

Update
This was incorrect (I "pre-typed" it; I was about to execute this procedure and since I was having the issues I was, I just submitted it hoping I'd be right. I wasn't...):
I, for one, am glad I had a seemingly older copy of 'cursor.pcf' which I gzipped then recreated my font cache to install, because now I have my older cursor font back, since I dislike the new one.

This is what actually happened:
So, after completely reinstalling all my fonts yet again thanks to an accidental slip-up along the lines of "rm *" in /usr/share/fonts/misc, I renamed out some 'cursor.pcf'/similar files in various directories to ${name}__ (eg "foo" -> "foo__"), then copied cursor.pcf.gz off of an older X installation into misc/. I then restarted X (well, I actually rebooted, since my Intel driver is faily and will sometimes produce a black screen when I restart X until I reboot).

And I finally, after about 4 hours of fixing a problem (idk if it was that long, it felt like it, it's 2:30am now), I was done.

Can has some kind of notification/news post next time this happens please?
(Error: news-update-3rdparty-undisclosed 3.2-2 depends on developer-telepathy 0.1.)

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-12-16 15:26:56)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-16 11:01:26

An interesting note about your X cursor if you're not using a theme

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