Anthony Campbell's Blog 1

Many people, including me, find that the standard mouse pointer in X is too small, particularly on laptops. You can fix this quite easily by replacing the cursor file (cursor.pcf.gz) with big-cursor.pcf.gz. The steps are as follows.

1. Download big-cursor.pcf.gz here.

The remaining steps must be done as root.

2. Copy big-cursor.pcf.gz to the directory that contains cursor.pcf.gz. In my case this is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc but yours may be different. Change to this directory.

3. Move cursor.pcf.gz aside
# mv cursor.pcf.gz cursor.pcf.gz.bak

4. Copy big-cursor.pcf.gz to cursor.pcf.gz
# cp big-cursor.pcf.gz cursor.pcf.gz

5. Try it out
Close X and restart it. You should now have a large cursor. Whatever form of the cursor you were using previously will still be there, but larger.

Note
Debian (and possibly other flavours of Linux) provide big-cursor.pcf.gz as a package (which is how I found it). If you are using Debian you can simply install the package and avoid the steps described above.