xterm pointer resources -- a solution and a rant

[David Tilbrook]

Tim Writer wrote:
> David Tilbrook <dt-hKuJ9UrQZDM at public.gmane.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>Tim Writer wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>I'm using fvwm2 and avoid gnome and kde if I can (call me a ludite).
>>>
>>>No, I can understand why.
>>
>>>>The xrdb -q does show the proper settings so I assume that nothing
>>>>is changing them.
>>>
>>>I just tried setting the pointer colour on my laptop (Debian woody with
>>
>>>XFree86 4.3.0 and xterm 4.3.0) and it doesn't work.  I also tried setting it
>>>in a running xterm using editres which also doesn't work.  It does work
>>>though on my desktop (Debian woody with XFree86 4.1.0 and xterm 4.1.0) so it
>>>appears to be a bug in recent xterm.
>>>
>>
>>
>>Sigh ... So do you know a source of the xterm source?
> 
> 
> You can find it here:
> 
>     http://dickey.his.com/xterm/
> 
> Unfortunately, this one has the bug too but maybe you can drop him an e-mail
> as he seems to be the current maintainer.
> 
> Good luck!
> 
Thanks Tim.

Dickey pointed me to two web pages:

	http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/RELNOTES2.html#5
and
	http://www.cs.umn.edu/help/linux/xcursor.html

The latter gave clues and after some trials I came up
with the solution which is to add:

	Xcursor.core: true

to my .Xresources file.

Now why didn't I think of that?

Rant on {
It's bull**** like this that will continue to plague linux.

All it took was four or five letters to a mailing list of a large
group of linux experts####### fans, a letter to the software's
maintainer, perusing the xterm source, consulting a bunch of web pages,
and some experimentation to get something working again after
making the mistake of upgrading.  I guess my 16 years of using
X10 and X11 just isn't enough.

Any attempt to grep the man pages is of course impossible
as they are all gzipped because some bright light thought
that this was a good idea.

and in exploring the wonderful world of linux man pages I discovered
the following little gem:

	/usr/share/man/man1/cancel.1.gz is symlinked to
	/etc/alternatives/print-cancelman which is symlinked to
	/usr/share/man/man1/cancel-cups.1.gz which is symlinked to
	/usr/share/man/man1/lp.1.gz which is symlinked to
	/etc/alternatives/print-lpman which is symlinked to
	/usr/share/man/man1/lp-cups.1.gz

symlinks ... the goto of the file system world.

Yes symlinks solve some problems, but what's this /etc/alternatives
nonsense?

Rant off }

Now, where was I?

-- dt


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