Tips&Tricks: minor Arch Linux annoyances

Here are two solutions to some minor annoyances I encountered after I started using Arch Linux.

Custom cursors

To choose a custom cursor theme using XFCE and Compiz-fusion (I don’t know if this thing happens with KDE/Gnome with or without Compiz, as I am too lazy to research nor do I really care) it isn’t enough to just select it from the mouse settings panel because the cursor will revert to the default one when hovering on some elements of a window. To bypass this add this to ~/.icons/default/index.theme (if it doesn`t exist, create it):

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=THEMENAME

After that restart X and gaze upon the awesomeness of your newly pimped cursors.

Giving shutdown/reboot privileges to regular users

I recently installed Arch Linux with XFCE on a computer and after setting up all everything needed I saw that the ‘reboot’ and ‘shutdown’ options from the Quit pannel were disabled. After a bit of googling I found the solution. Here’s what to do: make sure you have HAL installed (pacman -Qs hal). If you don`t, install it (pacman -S hal). After that edit /etc/rc.conf and add ‘hal’ to Daemons.
Then run this on root:

gpasswd -a USERNAME power

Reboot and behold the power of the newly active buttons.

Hail Skee & wooptoo \o/