Linux Desktop Hacks

Spice Up Your Desktop with Creative Mouse Cursors #23

Chapter 4, Related to X

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HACK

After you install the cursor theme, you can delete the contents of this work

directory. Decompress the file with the following command:

$ tar zxvf 4805-RedDot.tar.gz

This creates two directories, RedDot and RedDotSource. For those not famil-

iar with it, the

–z option passed to GNU tar will uncompress gzipped files.

In general, once you unpack a cursor theme, the directories that matter are

the ones that contain a single subdirectory below them called cursors. In this

case, the RedDot directory has a subdirectory called cursors. That tells you

which directory you want to install. (For the curious, the RedDotSource

directory contains all the files the author of the theme used to create the Red

Dot theme.)

You can install the Red Dot cursor theme simply by copying the RedDot

directory and its contents to ~/.icons (the .icons directory in your home

directory):

$ cp -a RedDot ~/.icons

If you want the Red Dot cursor theme to be available to all users, copy RedDot

to one of the shared directories instead. (Given the previous example of how

this Linux distribution is configured, the shared directories are /usr/local/share/

cursors/xorg-x11, /usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11, and /usr/share/pixmaps/xorg-x11.

They might be different for your system.) You need to log in as root to do this;

otherwise, you won’t have the privileges ...