Bug 581173

Is gnome-settings-daemon running in your session ?
Does 

ps ax | grep gnome-settings-daemon

report anything ?

It is running:

$ ps ax | grep gnome-settings-daemon
 2038 ?        Ss     0:02 /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon
 2776 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep gnome-settings-daemon

It doesn't work on KDE either. If you change the cursor theme in "System settings" nothing happen although Bluecurve theme is selected.
I've manually changed gtk-cursor-theme-name = "dmz-aa" to gtk-cursor-theme-name = "Bluecurve" in "/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc" and its OK now.

I don't really have any good ideas for how to further debug this.

Are you using compiz (=fancy 3d desktop effects) or metacity (=vanilla) as your window manager?

I'm having trouble with cursor theme too.  I like the mouse cursor to be large, and when I use metacity, setting the size seems to work.  But under compiz, half the time it's right and half the time it's wrong, depending on what part of the window you're pointing at.  Under metacity, changing the mouse theme and size works fine.

There's a related bug report here, which suggests it's bad patch applied to compiz:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/459647

Yes, I'm using compiz. My workaround (somehow suggested in the ubuntu bug report) was to simply rename the folders in /usr/share/icons so that the one containing the cursor theme I wanted (dmz white) is now named dmz, which if I'm not mistaken is the one that compiz is picking.

I can confirm that this issue is related to compiz. As log as I ran metacity, the Bluecurve icon theme was used without any problem. Issue applies to
- compiz-0.8.6-1.fc13.x86_64

Here's the excerpt of the fix, in ubuntu. At the time I was using Lucid Lynx and it really fixed, perhaps Red Hat devs can fix this now.

===============================================================================

If you can't wait for this to be fixed upstream, here's a step-by-step guide of how to fix based on d.a.'s description (thanks d.a.!) for those not familiar with modifying and re-building things from source.

1. Make sure you have apt-src installed [sudo apt-get install apt-src].
2. Checkout the compiz-core source [sudo apt-src install compiz-core], this may take a while.
3. Find the relevant file, and modify it accordingly. [sudo vi compiz-0.8.4/debian/patches/013-add-cursor-theme-support.patch].
3a. Modify lines 133, 135 and 136 to change "core.xml.in" to "core.xml.in.in" and save.
4. Rebuild the package [sudo apt-src build compiz-core], this may take a while.
5. Install compiz-core over existing version [sudo sudo dpkg --install compiz-core_0.8.4-0ubuntu15_amd64.deb] (note I'm on 64-bit system, so filename may be different for you, but you should only need to replace the core one, not the others).
6. Refresh compiz. I just did Alt+F2 [metacity --replace], then Alt+F2 [compiz --replace].

..and you're done! Mouse cursor and size should now reflect what you have set in your preferences.

Massive thanks to d.a. for figuring all this out!

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