Mouse dies in a Linux VM

[pavel-a]

I've installed a Fedora 13 guest and recent Vmware tools.

Everything is great.... until after some time (minutes or hours), the mouse in the guest

suddenly dies. Sometimes only the left button stops working,

sometimes both buttons.

Keyboard still works and the guest is alive.

Suspending and resuming the VM does not help.

After restart, the mouse works again, until it croaks again.

I can repro this on several hosts (all Windows XP), and I've reinstalled the guest.

Anyone seen this?

Thanks,

Pavel

Details: the mouse is plain vanilla USB. I have not touched any USB settings in Fedora.

[joelgb]

I'm seeing the same thing in OpenSuSE 11.3 running on ESX 3.5.

Using the open-vmware-tools as part of the OpenSuSE install.

Odd thing is that I have (3) 11.3 machines, 1 has never shown this behavior, I seems to have gotten another to stop by changing the KDE Activity setting Type to "Plain Desktop", and 1 that for the life of me I can't get it to stop. The first one has been upgraded from 11.1 -> 11.2 -> 11.3. The second was 11.2 -> 11.3, and the third is a fresh install of 11.3.

I'm able to fix it for a limited time by logging out or restarting X with CntrlAltBackspace.

I've tried restarting the vmware tools without luck. I'm wondering if it is an Xorg bug.

-Joel

[pbass83]

I found a suggestion on an opensuse forum that said to change the /lib/udev/rules.d/69-xorg-vmmouse.rules file.

The original file had this:

ACTION=="add|change", ENV=="?*", ATTRS=="i8042 AUX port", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/vmmouse_detect", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="vmmouse" The edited file looked like this: ACTION=="add|change", ENV=="?", ATTRS=="i8042 AUX port", KERNEL=="event[0-9]", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/vmmouse_detect", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="vmmouse"

This editor doesn't seem to like to display square brackets, but the 0-9 above should be enclosed in square brackets.

It worked for my opensuse 11.3 vm on a windows 7 64 bit host running vmware server 2.02 build 203138, after rebooting the guest. Before the change, my left mouse button would stop functioning.

[kdejaeger]

I am running Opensuse 11.3 64b on W7 64b aswell.

The mouse click was going dead from time to time aswell.

After applying the patch in xorgs mouseconfig (as stated above), the problem dissapeared.

The mouse is still doing weird at the edget of the screen and flickering but I am using open-vm released 03/2010, which comes by default on opensuse 11.3. A new release is available on the following repository: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization:/VMware/ . There is no opensuse 11.3 version of the repository yet. But the factory folder contains the latest open vm compilations. I haven't tried them yet.

[jiml8]

I just reported this same thing as a bug. Host Mandriva 2010.1 32 bit, guest OpenSUSE 11.3 64 bit. New upgrade to VMware Workstation 7.1.3, fresh install of OpenSUSE 11.3. Left button dies intermittently.

I'll try the change to the udev rules and see if that fixes it.

[jiml8]

The change to the udev rules did not solve the problem for me, but did substantially mitigate it.

I still encounter the situation where an "up" left mouse button is not detected, forcing me to "cancel" it either with the esc key or by clicking the right mouse button. After this, the left button usually becomes responsive again either immediately or within a second or two.

I have had one instance where the left button remained unresponsive for at least 15 seconds.

This is an improvement, but not a cure.