the X cursor looks like <> and such. cf https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=437894 reproduced on gentoo using xorg-server-1.4.0.90 and the cc9f510770700228e5d597c872e926a4e99bd950 git for xf86-video-ati.
you need a newer xserver. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 11796 ***
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