[9fans] mouse trouble in VMWare Fusion

[John Waters]

Greetings fellow 9fans,

I am having a strange and annoying issue with Plan9 inside vmware
fusion. In both windowed and full screen mode the cursor will,
seemingly randomly, "jump" into and out of the VM. That is to say that
if Plan9 has control of my mouse, and I move the cursor across the
"screen" of the VM, there are regions where the mouse will suddenly be
handed over to the Mac OS. I found that drawing a new terminal across
the screen will change the areas that are effected. This happens with
both "older" installs that I migrated over from VMWare Workstation on
Linux as well as "fresh" installs from iso images downloaded as
recently as two weeks ago.

I have not seen this problem with VMWare workstation.

1) Has anyone else seen this behavior?
2) Is there any known fix for the problem?

Thanks,
John

[Robert Raschke]

I've seen this happen with various guests in a VMware Player. Not sure
of the version. My workaround was to set the Player to never ever do
"intelligent" focus. There was a setting somewhere where you could set
click to focus and key combo to release it again.

I believe the magic mouse focus is one of the features that usually
only works reliably if you install the VMware guest enhancement
additions.

Robby

[Antonin Vecera]

Maybe this help you:

VMware Workstation settings:

Edit -> Preferences -> Input
uncheck "Grab when cursor enters window"
uncheck "Ungrab when cursor leaves window"

VMware Player settings:

preferences.ini
pref.motionGrab = "FALSE"
pref.motionUngrab = "FALSE"

Antonin

[David Paul]

I never got it to work correctly, so I built a tiny pc platform for testing. VMware would have been nice, but I had to many weird unexplainable things happen. Just didn't have time to track it down. Hope it works for you though. :-)

[Adrian Tritschler]

I had the same problem under VMware workstation 5.5 and couldn't solve
it, I ended up working around it by making the VMware plan9 system a
cpu/auth box and connecting to it with drawterm from the linux host
system.

Unfortunately it was all on a single IDE disk and a hardware failure
destroyed the system, I haven't got around to rebuilding... yet.

[Skip Tavakkolian]

> I had the same problem under VMware workstation 5.5 and couldn't solve
> it, I ended up working around it by making the VMware plan9 system a
> cpu/auth box and connecting to it with drawterm from the linux host
> system.

it is not this problem?

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/msg/96b8706125ee5c42

[Adrian Tritschler]

2008/8/27 Skip Tavakkolian <9n...@9netics.com>:

Suggestion is to "echo -n hwaccel off >/dev/vgactl"

From memory that helped, but didn't get rid of the problem entirely on
my system. It made the graphics usable/readable, but the mouse was
still wildly erratic.

Adrian

[John Waters]

Actually I used Plan9 on VMWare workstation for Linux for quite a
while without too many problems. Then again all I was doing was
working though Nemo's book. :)

VMWare Fusion is definitely not yet ready for prime time, I have
noticed some interoperability problems with other Guest OSes (FreeBSD)
and a few "heisenburg" type issues on Linux. I have also started to
experience conditions where Plan9 will not boot, complaining of divide
errors or memory problems, then boot w/o issue after sending a
ctrl-alt-del from the pulldown menu. I suppose that's why its half the
price of VMWare Workstation...

Lakshmi, from VMWare support, blew me off at the mere mentioning of Plan 9.

As for setting up physical hardware, I am on the tail end of a 11
month contract in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I need more stuff like I need
a hole in my head. I prefer virtualization-related silliness to
dealing with the "experts" in th local computer souk and subsequent
sale/transportation of the gear when its time to go home.

Ghabi kushi kabi kam.

*sigh*
Johnny