No screen updates occur while dragging the mouse in Puppy Linux -> misconfiguration

[Ravenous Bugblatter Beast]

I have installed Lucid Puppy Linux V5.2 as a guest in a virtual box VM and installed the virtual box guest additions. When I enable the mouse integration by switching to the vboxmouse driver in my xorg.conf it breaks dragging the mouse.

It appears that the OS does not receive any updates to the mouse's position when it is moved with the button down. So for example, if I have Firefox open with a long web page and drag the scrollbar down, the page is not redrawn while moving the mouse - it only updates once at the point when I release the mouse button. Even more annoying, this makes it impossible to move or resize windows with the mouse in the window manager provided as a default with this flavour of Linux. However, if I don't enable mouse integration dragging works normally.

I have tested using Virtual Box 3.2.12 and Virtual Box 4.0.2 in both Windows 7 64-bit and Mac OS X 32-bit hosts with the same results. I have also tried having virtual box emulate both a USB tablet pointing device and a PS/2 mouse. This choice also makes no difference.

VM Settings:

General:

• Operating System: Linux
• Version: Linux 2.6

System:

• Base Memory: 4GB
• CPUs 2
• Chipset: ICH9 (Virtual Box 4 only)
• Enable IO APIC
• Hardware Clock in UTC Time
• Enable PAE/NX
• Enable VT-x/AMD-V
• Enable Nested Paging

Display:

• 128MB video ram

Storage:

• One SATA controller
• Mount lupu_520.iso as a CD device
• Create a 5GB dynamically expanding disk

Network:

• One adapter, NAT, Intel Pro/1000 desktop

Audio:

• Intel HD

USB:

• On

Installation:

Download Puppy 5.2 from ​http://puppylinux.org/wikka/DownloadLatest

Although Puppy is a live CD linux, in order to install the additions it is necessary to install two SFS packages - the development tools and the kernel sources which requires formatting a hard disk partition.

1. Boot the CD and in the initial welcome dialog, configure the host name / localisation but ignore video settings.

2. From the OS menu, run System => GParted and format the hard disk as ext2 or ext3

3. From the OS menu reboot. This will prompt to create a personal storage file during the shutdown process. Choose default options for all steps, except increase the size to 1.25gb

4. Using the Quickpet program on the deskop, install the SFS packages for development tools and kernel sources. Then run the tool System => Bootmanager to enable them and reboot.

5. Install the Virtual Box additions by selecting Install Guest Additions on the virtual box device menu then:

make -C /usr/src/linux oldconfig prepare scripts mkdir /var/run/vboxadd adduser -S -G daemon -u 999 -h /var/run/vboxadd vboxadd mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run umount /mnt/cdrom

6. From the OS menu, choose Xorg Video Wizard and then the top option to run the wizard. Probe then choose an appropriate resolution LCD panel, 24 bit

At this point, display integration is working, dragging is working, but there is no mouse integration.

7. Run the Xorg Video Wizard again and choose to edit the Xorg.conf file:

• Find in a Section "InputDevice" the line: Driver "mouse"
• Change it to: Driver "vboxmouse"

8. Restart X

At this point mouse integration works but dragging breaks.

[Michael Thayer]

For mouse integration (NOT the USB tablet sort) to work you need to keep your mouse section in xorg.conf and to add an additional section for vboxmouse, using /dev/vboxguest as a device.

I will close this ticket as a misconfiguration issue, but feel free to re-open it if necessary.

[Ravenous Bugblatter Beast]

Adding an additional section didn't work, but changing /dev/mouse to /dev/vboxguest in the existing mouse section has resolved the problem. It would be a good idea to mention this in the Linux Guests section of the user manual which only talks about making xorg.conf changes for monitors, not mouse.

[Michael Thayer]

So much for that, I went to add that to the manual and ended up rewriting the whole section on Linux and X.Org Guest Additions...

See r35901.