[NotSupported] Cannot see mouse cursor on guest running centos minimal OS

[jagadish]

Hi Team,
I have a virtual box running on windows host and a guest running latest CentOS minimal image. I have installed Guest additions. I changed Pointing Device to USB tablet. My Mouse Integration is showing as On. However, I cannot make my mouse cursor visible in the VM guest window.

Since I have a minimal version of guest OS, I only see a terminal window when I login to guest. My requirement is to have mouse prompt on this window. I will have to copy text from host clipboard to guest and vice versa. Shared Clipboard is already set as bidirectional.

Details:

Guest OS: CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core)
Kernel: 3.10.0-957.27.2.el7.x86_64

Virtual box version: 6.0.10

I pretty naive in Virtual Box, please let me know if I am doing something terribly wrong. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[socratis]

I only see a terminal window when I login to guest. My requirement is to have mouse prompt on this window

As you figured out yourself, there's no mouse unless there's an X server running. You do not get a mouse in the Command Line Interface (CLI), only in the Graphical User Interface (GUI). That happens in RealLife™ as well. What do you want to do with a mouse in a CLI environment?

[jagadish]

Thanks for the response.
The only reason that I want the cursor is for copy - paste. I intend to run long commands for my work and would require to select long outputs from this terminal window, copy it to the clipboard and paste it on my host application. Please suggest any workaround.

I have an option to use a different ssh software and connect to this VM, but was hoping to have VBox guest session support my use case.

Thanks,
Jagadish

[socratis]

A Copy/Paste (C/P) operation requires a clipboard as you correctly said. However there's no clipboard in a CLI setup, because there's no X server installed. C/P doesn't work on a CLI setup. Installing the Guest Additions (GAs) won't help you either. If your Terminal that you use to SSH supports it, then that's the only way that you can make this work.

I could SSH to the CentOS with my OSX Terminal.app. My Terminal supports C/P, no problem. But I can't do that straight on the VM window.

[jagadish]

Thanks. I will try to do ssh to my guest using putty.

[socratis]

OK, marking this as [NotSupported].