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I installed a minimal version of Debian (wheezy), and then installed GNOME on top. However, it doesn't come with any special mouse cursors except for a non-descript black cursor.

I was wondering if there was a package I could download that contained the cursor set that came default with GNOME?

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1 Answer

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If your are only seeing a very hideous black cursor, with a very circa `95 look, It usually indicates that the only cursor found was Xorg's defaults.

On the other hand, you can get the really solid DMZ cursor theme. The package is named dmz-cursor-theme, and it had become a fairly common standard cursor these days. Try installing it from the CLI, with this command.

sudo apt-get install dmz-cursor-theme

You might need to restart Xorg to see the cursor reloaded. I'm not sure if this is the cursor you were talking about, but it's been the standard Ubuntu cursor for ages.

Remember that Gnome has cursor tools of its own, but to get that cursor as soon as Xorg has initialized is a different procedure. I believe the whole thing should be set up for you in that package. Personally I hate having the cursor show up from the DM, and then change to another set in the DE. So I always just find a cool one, and set it up as the Xorg default.

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Thanks for the answer, TechZilla - will let you know. – Julian H. Lam Jan 29 '12 at 19:45
Installing was fine, although the default was DMZ-Black, as opposed to DMZ-White. I attempted (in GNOME Shell) to run gsettings to set the theme, which worked, but now I have a mixture. The cursor in Firefox is DMZ-White, but DMZ-Black everywhere else.. – Julian H. Lam Jan 29 '12 at 20:20
The best way to change curser themes, is with update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme. The .deb cursor packages are great, because the cursors should already be in the alternatives system. Once you do that, I would set gnome to use the default. Which would be basically telling it to not set a cursor. This should give you that seamless cursor experience. I also absolutely hate gnome-settings-daemon, and I run Openbox and can do without it. – TechZilla Jan 31 '12 at 1:00
On the advice of another contributor in some other forum thread, I did set the mouse cursor default using update-alternatives. Still have a mix :( – Julian H. Lam Jan 31 '12 at 2:02
you mean he told you practically the same thing also? At least you should avoid the log in cursor switch, but it doesn't address this weird issue. Let me look around for a second. – TechZilla Jan 31 '12 at 2:35
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