Having given up the idea of using mice, or generally making my computer usable, I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to move the mouse pointer using the keyboard?

I believe that there is software to do this, but I wonder if you'd posted the details of your mouse problem in the Linux - Hardware forum to see if you can't instead fix your mouse. I've generally found it a remarkably easy matter to get most normal mice working.

If you do in fact want a mouseless computer, a window manager like Ion that's designed to accommodate this is probably a more comfortable situation than a keyboard controlled cursor.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/ion/