Installing mouse cursor themes

Posted by jodrell@spod.uk.net on 2003-09-19 09:36:52

If your system uses ?XFree86 4.3.0 or higher and you want to use a snazzy alpha-channeled mouse cursor theme, here's how you do it:

1. Create a directory in your home called .icons. This is the directory defined by the Freedesktop.org standards as the place for user-defined icon themes.

2. Place the cursor theme directory into ~/.icons. The directory should have the form ~/.icons/THEME_NAME/cursors.

3. With either gconftool or gconf-editor, set the value of /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme to the name of the new theme.

4. If you use another window manager or desktop environment, you can also place a line like this in ~/.Xdefaults: Xcursor.theme:THEME_NAME or you can set the XCURSOR_THEME environment variable in your startup scripts.

You can find cursor themes at the following addresses:

• http://kde-look.org/?xcontentmode=mouse
• http://themedepot.org/showarea.php4?area=19
• http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/982/?topic_id=982
  
  

There currently isn't a cursor category on art.gnome.org, but I'm sure there will be soon!

My personal favourite is the one created by jimmac, which can be found at http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=6550