QNX6, VMWare, Dell notebooks and mouse cursors

QNX USERS QNX6 - Applications
1

With QNX 6.3.2 and Photon running in a VMWare Desktop session on a Dell Latitude D820 notebook the mouse cursor sometimes acts funny. It seems to lose track of the screen perimeter. For example, using the touchpad and moving the cursor left it sometimes gets in a mode where it thinks the left edge is 2-3 inches to the right of the visible left edge and it won’t move past it. Similar things happen with the top of the screen where the cursor won’t move all the way to the top. Sometimes hitting Ctrl-Alt to get back to VMWare and then moving back to QNX solves it. Sometimes using the pencil eraser mouse for awhile solves it. The problem is a little difficult to characterize.

Anyone else seen this and come up with a solution?

2

Ken, no experience with this, but it is an interesting conceptual problem. First of all, is his VMWare running under XP or Vista? I’ve heard there are VM’s that run native over the hardware recently, I think at this site.

Assuming Windows, that means that there are 4 levels at which the problem might be happening.

  1. The hardware might be restricting the movement
  2. Windows might be restricting the movement
  3. VMWare might be restricting the movement
  4. Photon might be restricting the movement

So the first step I think is to figure out where the restriction occurs.
If it was 1, you would probably see the problem else where.
If it is 2, then there must be some VMWare problem translating what Photon wants to Windows.
This could be some kind of configuration problem, but then it probably would not be flaky the way you describe it.
The same could be said for if the problem is at 3.

I’m wondering if you can run Photon at different resolutions, and if you get different results?

3

Thanks for the reasoned response Mitchell.

It turns out that Kubuntu has the same issue, so it’s not exclusively a QNX/Photon problem.

This is VMWare 6.0.3 running on Windows XP and the problem never occurs outside of VMWare.

I’ll see if the problem happens with an external mouse. The Dell touchpads we’ve had have a history of weird problems.

4

It looks like old bug of VmWare. I saw this behavior of VM’s cursor not only in VW 6.0.3 and not only running QNX (but also Linux e.g.).
You can try to google in vmware forum for this bug.

5

I see this too. Same D820, same silly old behaviour… :neutral_face:

6

I find that if I release the input, the centre the windows mouse on top of the qnx mouse cursor before I capture again with a mouse click, then all is well.