Mouse went missing - had to kill session - anybody had this?

[stardotstar]

I ended up killing my X session which killed my VMWare session and everything else of course too.

I was working (across two screens) within one X server and had VMWare on the right screen and some terminal sessions and browser on the left.

When suddenly I found that my mouse pointer had disappeared.

I was able to type in teh command line window and so I did:

cat /dev/input/mice

and saw the garbage coming in as I moved the mouse - but still couldn't see the pointer.

So I also switched to another session and the mouse worked on the text screen - so I switched back and forth a couple of times to see if it would come alive again but no go.

I tried to ensure that it was not the release mouse focus for VMWare and I don't think so.

So I killed my X session and restarted X and it was back jsut fine.

I'm sure there is a process I could have just restarted to get it back - what do you think?

This is Gnome and 2.6.15 (anything else?)
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[EzInKy]

I'd bet on it being a problem with VMWare since the device was clearly still working.
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Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

[jure1873]

Somethinig similiar happened to me too. I figured out it's beacuse I've got two screens (the TV is on the right of the monitor) and when I was using scrollbars somehow my mouse pointer just disappeared and the only thing I could do was to kill x. Then I figured out that if I accidaentaly click on the second screen (tv) and then move my mouse on the first screen (monitor) and then release the button the pointer disappears. Maybe it's something similiar it's just in your case you have a vmware session instead of another screen.
Sometimes clicking on the second screen a few times solved the problem. Have you tried switching to a console and then back to x?

[stardotstar]

Yes, I tried the switching to terminal and back to X - no change but the mouse showed just fine within the terminal.

I was using two monitors and both your points make sense - I'll have to stay with it and next time it happens try some other things to do with the possibility that I got stuck in another desktop as a result of having different resolutions on my two screens and using the scroll...

Hmmm, thanks for your consideration.

Will
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[Waltarro]

Its definately vmware, I've had all kinds of weird quirks since
I started using it.. On a second machine that is running Suse 10
I also lost the mouse if I left vmware running in the foreground. It
seems to be ok if I minimize it when not using.

On my gentoo machine with 2 X Sessions running, after a while
switching to the second X session would cause the first to crash
as if I hit ctrl-alt-backspace. there are definately some bugs with
the vmware on linux.