AllowHID=TRUE problems in Workstation 6

[wmorris]

Has anyone had success with getting a secondary mouse to function properly with native mouse drivers in a WinXP Guest session of Workstation 6 when AllowHID is set to True in the VMX file? I had this setup working fine under Workstation 5.x, but I'm having a lot of problems under Workstation 6. The issue is that the secondary mouse seems to work, but the cursor isn't visible. If I move my primary mouse (the one attached to the host via a PS/2 port), the visible cursor in the guest moves. Moving the secondary mouse (the USB mouse attached to the guest's Logitech mouse drivers) will not move the visible cursor, but it IS moving a cursor because right-clicking displays a context menu on the desktop at a different location than the visible mouse cursor. If I turn on Mouse Trails in the Logitech driver, it will actually show a visible mouse cursor as I move the secondary mouse, but the guest still seems to be tracking the primary mouse cursor independently of the secondary mouse, so this isn't a solution to the problem. I've been at this for a week with tech support, and so far we're only going in circles, so any input from others who have tried this would be appreciated. BTW, in case you're interested, I'm attempting to get this to work so I can use the "extra" buttons on my secondary mouse. Back and Forward are two that I use all the time, but it has other nice features not supported by the native VMWare mouse drivers. I really wish they'd add support for (optionally) temporarily assigning the primary mouse exclusively to the guest so we could use native drivers in guest sessions. I'm willing to Ctrl-Alt my way out of a guest session in return for native mouse driver support.

[wmorris]

Update: VMWare tech support found a solution to this problem. If you add the following line to the Workstation 6.x VMX file:

vmmouse.present = "FALSE"

the dual mouse feature works correctly as it did in Workstation 5.5.

[devzero]

oh, great - this is the param i was searching for some time.

i wonder why there is no feature to configure keyboard/mouse as part of the graphical configuration dialog.

there is everything as a config option - but i always wondered about no mouse/keyboard.

i would expect it being there, too.

if i build a pc, i put a cpu on the mobo, i put ram inside, add a harddisk, attach other devices - so why being so inconsequent and not having keyboard/mouse to be configured there, too ?

with this, and with a gui config option for usb.generic.allowHID it would be piece of cake to make usb mouse/keyboard available to a virtual machine.

think of dual-user workstation with dual-head vga - where one user can use the host (dad, full employee) and one can use the VM (kid, trainee)

being a killer feature, imho - opening a new market for vmware !

[devzero]

it seems, that setting vmmouse.present=FALSE doesn`t have any effect.

i would expect that this disables the mapping of the host OS`s mouse into the guest - but if i click with the host mouse into the vmware windows, it`s getting catched on mouseclick - just standard behaviour.

is there a method to entirely disable the hosts`s mouse and keyboard inside the guest, so that only the attached second usb mouse/keyboard being used?

any params for that ?

furthermore, it seems that the VMware bios doesn`t have support for USB keyboards - the keyboard isn`t useable on early boot. maybe you can add support for HID keyboard in the VMware bios?

some information on that:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/Lf.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/input/w2kbd.mspx#EQB