Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLVED)

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Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLVED)

Postby mageiaqui » Jun 29th, '14, 23:24

I have Mageia 4 as a guest in Workstation 10. I installed VM tools in the guest.

Now here's the problem. Say I move the mouse off the Mageia VM screen, and go click on some window in the host, like check my email or something, then I mouse back over to Mageia. Now I am hovering over something I want to click on in Mageia, like Firefox. But when I click the mouse button, the cursor jumps back to where it left Mageia. So now I have to mouse back over to the Firefox icon and click it again.

Is this maybe a setting in VM tools? Or is this maybe some setting in Mageia? I can't really see any reason somebody would select this behavior, so I'm guessing VM tools is unable to reposition the mouse pointer to where it is now, for some reason, and Mageia just thinks it's where it last was.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Last edited by mageiaqui on Jul 1st, '14, 06:26, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest upon re-

Postby magfan » Jun 30th, '14, 14:02

I had the same problem until I added the following lines to my *.vmx file:

Code: Select all
mouse.vusb.enable = "TRUE"
mouse.vusb.useBasicMouse = "FALSE"
usb.generic.allowHID = "TRUE"
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest upon re-

Postby mageiaqui » Jul 1st, '14, 06:23

It worked. That fixed it. Now when I click in the Mageia VM, the mouse cursor stay in the same place.

Magfan, You are awesome.

keywords for future people - mouse jumps to edge, vmtools, edit vmx file, locate cursor, click in vm, vmtools places mouse cursor at edge, guest repositions mouse cursor
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLV

Postby jiml8 » Jul 1st, '14, 06:27

I have many different VMs that support a mouse and run in VMware. Of all my VMs, I have a highly hacked distro that started life as Mageia 3 but probably should no longer be called that and my new FreeBSD 10 distro that display this behavior; every other VM picks up the mouse where it is when the user clicks into the VM.

Adding the lines in the previous post to the vmx files for these particular VMs does not change their behavior.

Now, the hacked Mageia 3 caused me some trouble getting vmware-tools to install; there was a problem with the 3.10 kernel in particular that caused compile failures, and I had to debug one of the kernel modules in order to get it to compile. So I am not certain that vmware-tools is properly installed.

I also could not install vmware-tools in the FreeBSD environment; the installer insisted that there is no X installation (which was rather humorous because it was running under X when it claimed that), so I installed the open source variant of vmware-tools instead.

If I recall correctly, no other VM that uses a mouse had problems installing vmware-tools. The only other Mageia VM I have had was a Mageia1 32 bit VM that I tested a bit some time ago then deleted. That VM did not have any problems with vmware-tools and did not display the mouse behavior.

I suspect, therefore, that the problem occurs because of some issue installing vmware-tools. You might want to report on what, if any, issues you had doing that installation.
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLV

Postby mageiaqui » Jul 1st, '14, 06:48

For vmtools installation I always use the " --default " switch since I discovered it many years ago. This eliminates the 100 questions during vmtools install, which became quite a nuisance. I haven't *not* used the "--default" switch for probably 10 years now, so I can't remember the install questions, but I have created dozens of Linux VM guests, and I've never had a problem. I think next time I won't use the switch and see what the questions are again, or at least scroll through the CLI history.

And I do recall that this mouse behavior and a few other things were why I gave up on Mageia a year ago. So now I'm trying Mageia again. It was my main Linux VM for a while but I migrated to Xubuntu. Now Xubuntu has some weird video problem with their "updated" video system, so back to Mageia. I am so glad this mouse thing is fixable. I was just installing Fedora when I saw Magfan's solution.
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLV

Postby magfan » Jul 1st, '14, 12:40

mageiaqui wrote:Magfan, You are awesome.

@mageiaqui: Thank you! I'll put that on my business card...

@jiml8: Yes, I was wondering why this problem occures only in rare cases. Finally I just found a second solution for my Mageia-VM. Instead of adding the previously mentioned lines to the *.vmx file I installed the following package inside the Mageia-VM: x11-driver-input-vmmouse. It seems to solve the problem as well - even without editing the VMware stuff manually. Interestingly, the package x11-driver-video-vmware was already installed by default.
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLV

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 2nd, '14, 17:52

Just moved this thread into our tips&tricks subfotum.

If there are proposal for a more meaningful thread title, that would also be helpful, e.g.
VMware mouse position issues with Mageia VM / host
or something similar
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Re: Mouse position jumps to where it left the guest VM (SOLV

Postby magfan » Jul 3rd, '14, 09:07

The first time I had problems with the mouse inside a VM was when I used a Centos6 guest on a Mageia3 host last year. Editing the *.vmx file helped:
Code: Select all
mouse.vusb.enable = "TRUE"
mouse.vusb.useBasicMouse = "FALSE"
usb.generic.allowHID = "TRUE"

Just a few weeks ago I created a Mageia4 guest on a Mageia4 host. This new VM again showed unstable mouse behaviour and I simply added the same lines to the *.vmx file and everything was fine. So, my suggestion for a more meaningful thread title would be "VMware mouse position issues with Linux-VM on Mageia host".

But I guess other distributions than Mageia will also provide a package similar to the following:

    x11-driver-input-vmmouse - Xorg input driver for mice in VMware
    x11-driver-video-vmware - X.org driver for VMWare(tm)
So, it may not be necessary at all to edit the *.vmx file if those packeges are installed inside the Linux-VM.
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