31 Mar
2024
31 Mar
'24
6:37 p.m.
On Thursday 28 March 2024 13:33:15 E. Liddell via tde-users wrote:
Sorry for the delay in responding. Life has been crazy, internet is iffy, and
these days, even to get water and electricity sometimes can be a gamble.
Well, so I read what you say, and that makes sense, except for one detail:
/usr/share/icons
(where the individual cursors would be kept) is wiped out every time I
reinstall my system; thus also my wide selection of mouse cursors (130 of
which I never use) ought to disappear, and I would have to start over and
reinstall them.
Regarding the accuracy of my memory, I can say definitely that I got these
cursors when I installed Kubuntu Plasma, maybe around versions 10 or 11,
whenever I gave up on Hardy Heron 8.04x; and that, since that unlucky day, I
have only occasionally downloaded anything to do with KDE4/5 or its
associated krap.
Once I got into Debian>Devuan, I have had no major problems getting TDE to
work as I want; it was somewhat harder with the 'buntus, which I suspect had
more to do with those distros than TDE.
Through all this time, ever since I briefly used the KDE5 Plasma desktop, I
have always had these mouse icons available. I never install any packages
related to cursors or icons or themes that would explain this. When the KDE5
desktop was installed, there was a kind of menu (similar to the screenshots
of that window in TDE) where I could choose to install new mouse icons, so I
got them like that, through the KDE5 desktop, but they have remained there.
This, by the way, has persisted across multiple machines, as well as new
installations, reinstallations and upgrades. One supposes that somewhere
along the way, these mouse cursors would have been lost, if they were just
kept in </usr/share/icons> and nowhere else.
Which brings me back to my original question: Where can we find the packages
for these icons? Not that TDE ought to provide them all, but there must be
some way to get these through apt, some repositories where they are kept.
The same, by the way, goes for splash screens: there are a lot of nice splash
screens that were available in KDE5, but which aren't usable for TDE.
I still have ghosts begging to be used; for example, the Fingerprint splash
screen for KDE5, according to my own taste, is much nicer than TDE's version,
and I would like to use it instead, but when I try to enable it, I get one of
those endlessly churning pixellated swirls and a notification informing me
that this theme is not available. I have tried finding the folders where
these are kept, too, and hacking it manually, but this doesn't work.
It seems to me that these two things, the mouse cursor themes and the splash
screens, are somehow related; only that the mouse cursors are simpler, and
still work on my machine, whereas the splash screens involve more animation
and such.
Sorry for rambling on, but maybe this chapter of my life's story will contain
clues for where to find those mouse cursors and splash screens.
Bill
Is there some
way that we can download these themes
to use with our TDE desktop, without actually installing all the other
KDE5 krap? This may benefit other TDE users, as well as my future self,
if I should ever lose these themes.
While gnome and KDE both have a few cursor themes made just for
them, cursors are handled by the X server. On my system they're stored
in /usr/share/icons , although I believe it's also possible to install to a
subdirectory in ~ .
While I can't trace the origins of any of the cursor packages shown in
your screenshot specifically, I doubt they're part of KDE5 as such—your
distro may just have wanted to provide a rich set of cursor options, and
so grabbed a bunch from who-knows-where. Or you may have installed
them yourself, then forgotten (it's happened to me).
As far as I can tell, the Gentoo packages for individual cursors just
unpack them into /usr/share/icons and don't require any particular DE to be
installed, so you can probably just copy the files somewhere if you want to
reinstall the cursors at a later time. As for downloading them, you'll
need to find out where they're originally from first, but it should be
possible to get them as standalones.
E. Liddell