How to change mouse pointer icon in Xfce Debian 7 Wheezy?

Question

I copied the cursor theme (oxy-neon or Oxygen Neon) to /usr/share/icons and from Applications Menu -> Settings -> Mouse, I am able to see the new theme. I clicked on it and the pointer doesn't change. However the text typing icon ('I'), busy icon, hand icon, and resize window icons got changed. The pointer icon remains the same, the black Adwaita. I removed the Adwaita folder from the icons folder, and still the mouse pointer doesn't change. Is the pointer theme specified elsewhere? I have no setting under home directory. I tried logging out, restart, restarting xfwm4, but nothing works.

I just found that the icon pointer changes when the pointer is inside Firefox, but it's not consistent. It keeps changing when I click menu items. Very weird.

Any idea how to fix this?

This is the output of running: gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.interface :

~$ gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.interface
org.gnome.desktop.interface automatic-mnemonics true
org.gnome.desktop.interface buttons-have-icons false
org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels false
org.gnome.desktop.interface clock-format '24h'
org.gnome.desktop.interface clock-show-date false
org.gnome.desktop.interface clock-show-seconds false
org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink true
org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink-time 1200
org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink-timeout 10
org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 24
org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme 'Adwaita'
org.gnome.desktop.interface document-font-name 'Sans 11'
org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations true
org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Cantarell 11'
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-color-palette 'black:white:gray50:red:purple:blue:light blue:green:yellow:orange:lavender:brown:goldenrod4:dodger blue:pink:light green:gray10:gray30:gray75:gray90'
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-color-scheme ''
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-im-module ''
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-im-preedit-style 'callback'
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-im-status-style 'callback'
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme 'Default'
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme 'Adwaita'
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-timeout-initial 200
org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-timeout-repeat 20
org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'gnome'
org.gnome.desktop.interface menubar-accel 'F10'
org.gnome.desktop.interface menubar-detachable false
org.gnome.desktop.interface menus-have-icons false
org.gnome.desktop.interface menus-have-tearoff false
org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Monospace 11'
org.gnome.desktop.interface show-input-method-menu true
org.gnome.desktop.interface show-unicode-menu true
org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.0
org.gnome.desktop.interface toolbar-detachable false
org.gnome.desktop.interface toolbar-icons-size 'large'
org.gnome.desktop.interface toolbar-style 'both-horiz'
org.gnome.desktop.interface toolkit-accessibility false
~$

Answer 1

Fixed it by creating a symlink. The theme folder name is oxy-neon.

cd /usr/share/icons
sudo ln -s oxy-neon default

Then from the mouse settings, choose default as the theme. Logout the session and the new cursor will appear.

Answer 2

There are several places to check out. One of them is gsettings:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme 'nameofyourtheme'

Other is the alternatives:

ls -l /etc/alternatives/x-cursor-theme
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 jul  2 22:29 /etc/alternatives/x-cursor-theme -> /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/cursor.theme

Which get modified calling:

update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

And lastly the XFCE way using the xfce-mcs-plugins package. In this case you must make sure that it's compiled with the Xcursor support. Just check the Mouse Settings for your theme.

Now, there's a last possibility and it's that you don't have a cursor theme installed. You must make sure that exist a directory like this:

/usr/share/icons/<themename>/cursors/somefiles

If you don't have it, is most likely that you didn't installed the theme correctly. You can use ~/.local or whatever you distribution has.

~/.local/share/icons/<themename>/cursors/somefiles