VMware Player mouse issues in Karmic

martin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:43:12 +0000

VMware Player experiences mouse capture problems when run under Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic host. Inside the guest window, the mouse pointer works fine in a top-left rectangle of the window (640×480 pixels?) but outside of this area the mouse pointer switches its focus to the host. Add the following line to the file /etc/vmware/bootstrap to fix it:

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

Important note: VMware code needs to be recompiled each time the Linux kernel is updated and this entry may prevent it from compiling successfully. The additional line should be removed or commented out prior to building VMware Player and then put back in back again.

For a discussion see this thread on Ubuntu forums.

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X in Karmic

martin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:43:55 +0000

In a previous post I described to how to enable the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to restart the X server. However, those steps were applicable to Ubuntu 9.04 only and have no effect in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The necessary changes to enable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X in Karmic are below.

Open Preferences > Keyboard and select the Layouts tab.
Click the Layout Options… button.
In the dialog window expand the “Key sequence to kill X server” entry and select the checkbox.

the empty quarter » karmic-upgrade

VMware Player mouse issues in Karmic

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X in Karmic