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toce
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-09-2022 05:05 AM

Reviving suspended Debian 11 VM with open-vm-tools may hide cursor MacOS wide

I have a Debian 11 VM with backported kernel 5.18.0-0.deb11.4-arm64 and backported open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop packages. Under certain circumstances in this VM I lose the cursor not only in the VM itself but also MacOS wide.

What's the scenario:

  • Have all your VM's shutdown properly. No VM is in suspended state.
  • Reboot your Mac and start VMware Fusion.
  • Boot the offending Debian 11 VM (with backported kernel and open-vm-tools pkgs) and logon.
  • Open a Nautilus file browser (so we have an active window)
  • After a minute or so suspend the VM.
  • Close VMware Fusion.
  • Reboot your Mac.
  • Restart VMware Fusion and revive the suspended VM.
  • Click in the VM on the desktop.
  • At that point the cursor will disappear not only in the VM but also outside of the VM.

How to recover the cursor:

  1. Attempt to blindly place the hidden cursor in the MacOS dock.
  2. Keypress option-command-esc (this will bring up the task manager). Your cursor should appear somewhere together with the task manager.
  3. Try to navigate the cursor to the dock, preferably avoiding the VM area, and scrub over the dock. In the process you may lose your cursor but it will become visible again when meeting the dock.
  4. Click the Finder icon. Your cursor is now restored.
  5. If step 3+4 did not work (my experience is it'll take a few attempts), press Esc to quit the task manager and go back to 2.

Next to the Debian 11 VM I also have another Debian 11 VM without a backported kernel and no open-vm tools. With this VM I have no problem suspending and reviving the VM in the scenario described above.

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2 Replies
toce
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-14-2022 05:39 AM

Weirdly enough, the issue reported above can no longer be reproduced.
Consider this issue closed.

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wila
Immortal
Immortal
‎09-14-2022 03:38 PM

Hi,

I think what happened was that vmware-tools is not running well yet during the resume of the VM.

In that case the cursor stays captured to the VM, even if you move out of it.
You can revive the cursor in that case with control+command.

Using that key combo, should always give the host the control of the mouse and keyboard.

Hope this helps,
--
Wil

 

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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