Weird problem with Tumbleweed and mouse clicks

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1

I’ll start by saying that this is not simple to describe, and that I’m starting from an unfortunate place. I am usually pretty good at troubleshooting, but this one has me stumped.

I’ve been running Tumbleweed for some time now. Most of my work is in a collection of VirtualBox VMs, most of them are Win10, a few are Linux (SLES), with Tumbleweed running the host. Until Tuesday, this was all fine and working. I was up to date with Tumbleweed as of Sunday night, so reasonably current. Tuesday morning, my laptop died. Hardware, wouldn’t even power up to show anything. So, Tuesday morning, I was at the local BestBuy getting a new laptop. Needing it now, I took what I could get (HP 17-by4633dx), and have upgraded it with a 2T SSD. Memory is still 8G (64G is on order). This replaced my ~5 year old HP laptop, and once I get the RAM installed, should be fine for my needs. Being a new machine, the install of Tumbleweed is also new, network installed as of Tuesday morning, with the default repos + packman.

Installed with Gnome, added a few things that I want/need/like to have (git, Opera, subversion) and a couple of Gnome extensions. All of this I had before, so should be fine. All from the regular repos. I pulled the drive from my old laptop, attached it via external USB, and copied over my data (cp -rpv /run/mnt/old-disk/home/dgersic /home/).

That’s the base. This is where things start to get weird.

With a single Win10 VM running in full screen (VM set to 4G RAM, 2 CPUs), I’ll lose mouse control. The mouse pointer still moves around, but mouse clicks no longer work. Keyboard still works, the VM is still running. I can get out of the VM by hitting <Right Ctrl> then <Alt><Tab> to switch away from it. Once out of the VM, I can click on other things in Gnome, so starting another application works. If I have a terminal open, I can use the mouse within the terminal to highlight text. I can launch Files and click around in the file system. I can launch Opera, but once it starts, it won’t take mouse clicks either, so I can’t switch tabs or pick from bookmarks, nothing like that works. I can launch Firefox, and it takes mouse clicks just fine.

This continues until I stop the VM and close VirtualBox and Opera. Then I can start either one of them and things work fine again. I haven’t yet found a third application affected by whatever this is, and VirtualBox seemingly have nothing in common with each other.

So far, this only seems to start when I have a VM running in fullscreen. I’m testing now to see if running the VM windowed keeps it from happening.

Thinking it could be a problem with the VM, I set up a new user, logged in, started VirtualBox, and installed a brand new Win10 VM. That had the same problem. So it’s not the VMs, and this also eliminates the Gnome extensions, since I didn’t bother to install them for my test user.

Looking for ideas, things to try, even suggestions as to where to look for clues on this one.

2

I don’t really know. I have linux systems in VMs, but I have not tried Windows in a VM.

Have you tried adding a graphic tablet as an input device. Hmm, I’m assuming KVM. I don’t know about other virtualization methods. On a linux VM that can make a difference, assuming the version of linux recognizes the graphic tablet.

Without the graphic tablet, the mouse can become locked to the VM, so that clicks outside the VM are not recognize (or perhaps not even possible). With KVM, the key sequence CTRL-ALT does toggle the lock, but it is smoother with the graphic tablet.

3

While I prefer Linux, as an IT consultant pretty much all of my paying work requires Windows. Even work as a Linux admin, which I do some of, requires a Windows box to run the VPN client to get there. So I spend a lot of time “using” Windows, but mostly as just a gateway to getting somewhere else to do whatever it is I’m getting paid to do.

I don’t have another device to add. Not sure what that would do. Isn’t a graphic tablet essentially just another pointing device that looks like a “mouse” to the system? Laptop has a trackpad, and I have a couple of trackballs connected as USB devices. I haven’t used an actual “mouse” as a mouse in about 20 years.

Updating, though, I spent all day today with one VM running (all that I can do with 8G RAM), but running windowed instead of full screen, and did not experience any of the weird symptoms.

It may be that this is somehow a VirtualBox thing. I had another weird VirtualBox specific symptom that I was thinking was not related to this, but maybe it is. When running a VM fullscreen, there is a hidden pull-down menu at the top of the screen. When you move the mouse pointer in to the menu area, it pulls down, and you can select options and such. When I do this, the menu itself freezes or hangs or something. It pulls down, but nothing on it responds. With the VM in windowed instead of fullscreen, the pull down menu also isn’t there. Perhaps both of these are symptoms of the same problem.

The part I can’t make sense of is how it affects Opera. The only commonality I could think of between VirtualBox and Opera is QT. VirtualBox uses QT, and Opera used to, but I read somewhere that as of about a year ago, Opera is no longer using QT. Maybe that’s not entirely true? Maybe there’s still some QT bits in there somewhere.

My additional RAM should be here tomorrow. Once that’s in, I’ll do some more testing and report back.

4

Yes, that’s about right.

My experience is with KVM. I briefly tried “virtualbox”, but that was after I had been using KVM. And I preferred KVM.

With KVM, adding a graphic tablet is something I can configure.

If I don’t have a graphic tablet, then my mouse is seen as a mouse. And the mouse pointer is constrained to be within the virtual screen. With a graphic tablet, the mouse pointer can wander all over, and outside the virtual screen area – smoothly flows between use in the VM window and use elsewhere on the computer desktop.

The disadvantage of the graphic tablet is that it does not trigger actions at the virtual screen edge or corners. I have to remove the graphic tablet and revert to a basic mouse if I need those functions.

I guess virtualbox is handling the pointer a bit differently.

I haven’t tried using opera in a VM.

5

Is your host OS desktop using Wayland or Xorg? If the former, then I assume that Xwayland is involved to support it and that may produce strange behavior.

For example
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/19043?cversion=0&cnum_hist=2

6

Oh. That’s interesting. Thanks Deano. I had found some older references to Archlinux and VirtualBox, but not this reference to it being Wayland. The description in the linked thread does seem to match. I’ll test and report back if disabling wayland helps or not.

7

Following up here finally, this does seem to have been the answer. Switching Gnome from Wayland to Xorg resolved the weird behaviour in VirtualBox.

Thanks!

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Ok, good to know. :slight_smile: