Just installed brand new Debian Wheezy x86_64 with XFCE 4 on my 2010 model netbook having an Intel Atom processor. XFCE is fast and is less resource hungry. As it's the case with much of the distros, the UI themes are not very eye-candy. So in the process of making it look more beautiful, I got stuck with not being able to change the mouse pointer icon. The interesting thing is that rest of the mouse icon type changes. Also when I am within Firefox, I can see the updated icon. Everywhere else I get the default adwaita icon. Fixing this is simple.

# cd to global icons dir
cd /usr/share/icons

# remove if default exists
sudo rm default

# create a symlink setting oxy-neon (which is the name of the folder containing
# mouse icon theme) as the default mouse theme
sudo ln -s oxy-neon default

Choose Mouse option from Applications Menu > Settings and select the Theme tab and choose Default as the pointer. Logout and back in again and the new mouse theme will appear.