[SOLVED] Mouse pointer/cursor is reset to X defaul on XFCE and Gnome

softtower · 2010-09-09 05:51:44

Recently both of my laptops, after upgrading the system with pacman -Suy lost their mouse cursors: they get this weird small dark pointer, but for some windows they use big "X" as a pointer and for some windows they use the correct pointer (Polar theme in my case).

One laptop is XFCE and another is Gnome. Both are 64bit, with all the latest packages.

Why are mouse cursors broken? Changing them via preferences/appearance doesn't work - simply nothing happens. Googling didn't help.

Anyone else lost their theme cursors?
Thanks!

Last edited by softtower (2010-09-09 16:50:41)

karol · 2010-09-09 10:34:40

I'm not a DE guru, but you can check 'man xsetroot'.

Tinymeat · 2010-09-09 11:45:05

You could try the following:

Go to "/usr/share/icons" and look for the subdirectory "/default".
If it exists there should be a file named "index.theme".
In my case this file was a symbolic link, so I decided to delete it and to create a new file.
You have to edit the file as this:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=(your-cursor-theme)

"your-cursor-theme" is the name of the directory in "usr/share/icons" in which your polar-theme is installed.
Now you should have your desired theme systemwide installed.

Have a nice day.

softtower · 2010-09-09 16:36:23

Tinymeat, I tried that (that was the only googlable advice) and it still doesn't work. On both machines.

What happens is this:

The default cursor is mostly default black crappy one. But occasionally, on some windows, it changes to polar (my theme). Sometimes it also changes to polar for wait/edit cursors. Basically just jumps back/forth from the configured theme to the default one. And very rarely, again for some windows, goes back to the default "X" provided by xorg.

I strongly believe there's a major regression introduced recently by something like GTK but I can't pinpoint/confirm my suspicion so I can't even file a bug upstream.

What's surprising is that nobody's asking about it yet. I guess most people are just using the default black cursor and never cared installing cursor themes?

softtower · 2010-09-09 16:51:50

I just simply did:

rm -rf ~/.icons/*
cp -r /usr/share/icons/Polar ~/.icons/current
cp -r /usr/share/icons/Polar ~/.icons/default

one of the two did it.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-09 05:51:44

[SOLVED] Mouse pointer/cursor is reset to X defaul on XFCE and Gnome

#2 2010-09-09 10:34:40

Re: [SOLVED] Mouse pointer/cursor is reset to X defaul on XFCE and Gnome

#3 2010-09-09 11:45:05

Re: [SOLVED] Mouse pointer/cursor is reset to X defaul on XFCE and Gnome

#4 2010-09-09 16:36:23

Re: [SOLVED] Mouse pointer/cursor is reset to X defaul on XFCE and Gnome

#5 2010-09-09 16:51:50

Re: [SOLVED] Mouse pointer/cursor is reset to X defaul on XFCE and Gnome

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