I've been totally impressed with SuSE 10.1 so far... except for the default cursor theme. The grey/silver poofy looking pointer is horrible--it's hard to see. Not to mention the "hand" cursor... the finger is absurdly long--so long that I often find myself overshooting links in my browser. I can't even begin to speak of the stupid clock cursor...egh. What's wrong with a basic white cursor set??

Here's the problem: I can't figure out how to change it system-wide. Sure, I've switched to the Industrial cursors in Gnome and KDE, but that doesn't do a bit of good when I run one of my favorite lightweight WM's such as fluxbox or fvwm. And the cursors aren't consistent in Gnome and KDE even after changing them. Most apps are fine, but when I'm using Opera, for example, as soon as I mouse over the window it's back to the horrific SuSE defaults. And no matter what I do, the astoundingly stupid cursors are back every time I boot into (or log out and return to) gdm or kdm.

I've been poring over forums looking for an answer, and I tried some suggestions on some Arch Linux forums... alas, in vain. I've added
to my ~/.Xdefaults and to the global Xresources file. No luck. I've tried almost every different incarnation I could think of. I've read that it should be set by "Xcursor.theme:" rather than "Xcursor*theme:", but neither work. I've also tried using "[Industrial]" rather than plain "Industrial" as was suggested on an OpenBox howto. Nothing.

Another thread suggested that the /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme file should contain
but that doesn't seem to help.

Does anyone else share my hatred of the default SuSE cursors? And more importantly, has anyone figured out how to change them?

Control center - Peripherals - Mouse - Cursor theme.

Like I said, I've changed the cursors in KDE and Gnome. What I can't seem to do is swich the cursors system-wide. Every time I log out to kdm or gdm, the cursors go back to default. The gdm/kdm situation isn't a huge deal--what really bothers me is that I can't switch them when using Fluxbox, WindowMaker, etc. All the lightweight WM's use the default cursors. There must be a way to control this... thanks anyway, bigrigdriver.

Well, I solved the problem, and it was much easier than I had imagined. The default mouse theme is defined in /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager with the variable X_MOUSE_CURSOR. Finally, no more fluffy default cursors!