Linux Desktop Hacks

Spice Up Your Desktop with Creative Mouse Cursors #23

Chapter 4, Related to X

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HACK

to set up your desktop to use them. A wide variety of custom cursor themes

are available, ranging from the subtle (cursors decorated with a red dot) to

the outrageous (a Tux penguin grabbing windows to resize them!).

Does Your Desktop Support Cursor Themes?

You need XFree86 4.3 or later or Xorg (a fork of the XFree86 project) for

custom cursors to work. All recently released Linux distributions include

one or the other, so it is unlikely that your Linux desktop cannot support

custom cursors, but you need to be sure. Type this command to see which

version of X you have installed:

# X -version

If your Linux distribution installed XFree86, all you have to do is make sure

the version is 4.3 or higher. For example, look for a string something like the

following in the output of the

X -version command:

XFree86 Version 4.3.0 (or higher)

If your Linux distribution is using the Xorg branch of X11, you should see

something like this in the output:

X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 6.7 (or higher)

If you see anything like either of these strings, it means your version of X

supports custom cursor themes.

What Themes Are Available by Default?

Unfortunately, Linux distributions vary considerably as to where they store

the default cursor themes. If the documentation for your Linux distribution

doesn’t tell you where to find ...