USB Mouse Under VMWare

Cojack · Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 11:23 pm Post subject: USB Mouse Under VMWare

Just installed VMWare and when I tried to boot up the virtual machine it tells me that X is returning mouse type 20, which is apparently a type unrecognized by the VMWare autoconfig, and thus fullscreen mode is disabled. I went to go select my mouse by hand, a USB Intellimouse, and it says that the usb device is currently being used by the host machine (the hid driver has it) and cannot be used by the guest OS.

According to the VMWare docs, you must release the device from use on the host OS before it can be used by the guest. They suggest using rmmod on the usb kernel module to do this. However, I don't seem to remember having to do this before in gentoo, and as I recently (last week) reinstalled from scratch (d'oh!) and am now following stable daily, I'm wondering if this is a new "feature" or just my dumb self being dumb.

Anyone had the same experience? Is there a way to make VMWare and my mouse play together nicely? Can't we all just get along!?

kram · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 35

I got this error when I changed my mouse protocol to ExplorerPS/2 in XF86Config-4, try changing yours to IMPS/2

you won't be able to use extra mouse buttons if you do though

i left mine on explorerps/2 cos I don't really care about fullscreen vm

Cojack · Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 4:30 am Post subject:

Hmmm, I was hoping it wasn't that. When I reinstalled gentoo, I set up my mouse as ExplorerPS/2 specifically so that I could use the side buttons. I wouldn't care so much about fullscreen mode if I weren't using VMWare entirely for graphics work.

Maybe I'll just change between the two settings if I plan on using VMWare?

I wonder if this an X problem (failure to report a valid mouse type) or a VMWare problem (not able to recognize this as a valid mouse type)...

Regardless, thanks a lot for the help.

trolley · Apprentice Joined: 12 Jun 2002 Posts: 292 Location: Canada

You might want to read through the VMWare docs again. USB mouse and keyboard are not treated as USB in the guest OS. They are seen as PS/2 devices.

Cojack · Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 5:12 am Post subject: FOLLOW-UP

It turns out that the change from ExplorerPS/2 to IMPS/2 in XF86Config did fix the problem.

Since VMWare couldn't identify the mouse type, I'm guessing it couldn't auto-detect how to take control of the mouse properly. I couldn't say with any certainty, but I'd bet that VMWare just needs to be updated to recognize this particular return value from X.

Digiman · Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 5:24 pm Post subject:

This is interesting, I am currently building my new PC with Gentoo and will be running a USB Mouse in VMWare as well. So this is good to know.

Also, instead of always editing your XF86Config file every time you want to switch you could create a new Mouse Device in the config file and add the new InputDevice to the Server Layout. You can actually run both IMPS/2 and ExplorerPS/2 on the same mouse and it will use the functionality of both drivers on the same mouse. So that way it will work in Vmware with the IMPS/2 and use the functionality of the ExplorerPS/2 in X.

Hope that helps,
-- Digiman