Bug 28735 – GNOME Mouse panel should show installed XCursors

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Graeme Humphries 2003-09-14 15:18:06 UTC]

If you install some of the *-xcursors themes for XFree86, they never show up in
the cursors configuration part of GNOME's Mouse configuration utility. It would
be nice if they showed up, and if you could use this panel to switch cursor
themes on the fly... currently, if you manually edit
/usr/share/cursors/xfree/default/index.theme and then run the Mouse config
program, the theme will be updated to whatever is set in */index.theme, but none
of the themes ever show up or are choosable in the Mouse program's list of
cursor themes.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Mouse config applet.
2. Click on "Cursors" tab.
3. See lack of installed themes. ;)




Portage 2.0.49-r3 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.2.3, glibc-2.3.2-r1,
2.4.20-gentoo-r6)=================================================================
System uname: 2.4.20-gentoo-r6 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2500+
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -mfpmath=sse -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
COMPILER="gcc3"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /var/qmail/control /usr/kde/2/share/config
/usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/3.1/share/config
/usr/share/config"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/env.d"
CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -mfpmath=sse -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="sandbox autoaddcvs ccache fixpackages"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ http://gentoo.noved.org/
ftp://gentoo.noved.org/ http://mirrors.tds.net/gentoo ftp://mirrors.tds.net/gentoo"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 oss apm avi crypt cups encode foomaticdb gif jpeg libg++ libwww mad
mikmod mmx mpeg ncurses nls pdflib png quicktime spell truetype xml2 xmms xv
zlib directfb gtkhtml berkdb slang readline arts aalib bonobo svga ggi tcltk
java guile mysql X sdl gpm tcpd pam ssl perl python esd imlib oggvorbis gnome
gtk qt kde motif opengl mozilla gphoto2 cdr scanner 3dnow acpi acpi4linux autofs
cjk clamav dga dnd doc dv dvb dvd dvdr evo faad ffmpeg flash gb gd geoip glut
gnomedb gps gstreamer gtk2 imagemagick imap innodb ipv6 ladcca libgda lirc
md5sum memlimit mldonkeypango mng nocd oav pda radeon S3TC samba sse
stencil-buffer tiff transcode type1 usb v4l videos wmf xinerama xvid -alsa -gdbm"

[Comment 1 Mike Gardiner (RETIRED) 2003-09-17 03:53:37 UTC]

which is this "GNOME Mouse configuration utility" you're talking about? gnome-mouse-properties only gives me three options to change my cursors, is this where other themes should show up ? I have about 4 other mouse themes and they dont appear here.

or are you requesting we add this feature to a default gnome tool ?

[Comment 2 Graeme Humphries 2003-09-17 07:38:33 UTC]

Yeah, I guess the actual commandline option is "gnome-mouse-properties", and yeah, you can see that it only shows a couple of generic themes, and none of the extra ones that are installed.

I just assumed that this was a bug, that this program should be showing all installed xcursors themes and letting the user pick from them. I was lead to this assumption because if you edit "/usr/share/cursors/xfree/default/index.theme" and run gnome-mouse-properties, it does end up updating your current xcursors theme to whatever you changed index.theme to... it's just that currently installed themes don't show up in its list.

So, I guess I'm unsure of the intended behavior of this app. If it's /not/ supposed to be changing xcursors themes, then what kind of alternate cursor theme system does it work with? I guess if it works with some alternate cursor-theme system, I'd request changing this bug to a feature request, since there's really no reason to be using anything but xcursors at this point, IMO.

[Comment 3 foser (RETIRED) 2003-09-21 11:43:17 UTC]

I think there are plans in this area for gnome 2.6

Aren't mouse themes tied to icon themes atm (?)

[Comment 4 Graeme Humphries 2003-09-21 17:51:48 UTC]

I'm not sure of that, actually... extra icons themes doesn't give you extra cursors themes, and as long as you're using the xfree cursors themes, gnome's cursors don't seem to make any difference.

Well, as long as they've got it planned for some GNOME release I'm happy. :)

[Comment 5 Spider (RETIRED) 2003-09-22 05:30:44 UTC]

Actually I think there might be some code in either ximian or RedHat for this, I'm not sure though. it would quite be welcome


and icons are currently lower than that, it lies in the ~/.Xresources  area.

[Comment 6 foser (RETIRED) 2003-12-23 09:40:42 UTC]

has anyone located this code? that would be convenient ;)

We're interested in adding support, but we lack time to find out for ourselves.

[Comment 7 Graeme Humphries 2004-01-01 19:08:43 UTC]

I'd like to also note that since GNOME 2.4 went stable, xfree cursor themes have stopped working altogether on Gentoo boxes... it looks like the GNOME cursor selections are now overriding the standard xfree themes...

I'm going to look to see if there's a way to tell the GNOME control panel applet about the installed themes, which would go a long way towards closing this bug. :)

[Comment 8 Graeme Humphries 2004-01-01 19:27:21 UTC]

http://jodrell.net/gnome-hacks/hacks.html?id=30

Looks like you set the theme you want in GNOME's database under /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme, and then it should pick the right one. However, I haven't determined yet whether it works with the Gentoo generic /usr/share/cursors/xfree directories or just the user local ~/.icons/THEME_NAME/cursors.

[Comment 9 Spider (RETIRED) 2004-07-11 13:50:12 UTC]

Still no code. 

[Comment 10 Graeme Humphries 2004-08-12 08:31:26 UTC]

It looks like the gcursor project (which has an ebuild in portage now) provides this functionality, so this bug doesn't really matter anymore.

[Comment 11 Mike Gardiner (RETIRED) 2004-08-12 08:36:49 UTC]

Thanks for the reminder Graeme, you're correct.