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Keyboard-mouse freeze installing Snow Leopard guest

Posted: 18. Apr 2021, 04:45
by Malbone
Host: 2013 Mac Pro - Catalina OS 10.15
Guest: Snow Leopard OS 10.6

Installed VB 6.1 and a Snow Leopard guest, then uninstalled and reinstalled both.

Now the guest install gets to the opening screen (select language) and both the keyboard and mouse do not work inside the VM. Can't get past the opening screen to install the VM.

I uninstalled the VM and VB, removed the kext files, rebooted, reinstalled, same result. Attaching the log file.

Is there a fix, or have I killed the possibility of running VB on this machine?

Re: Keyboard-mouse freeze installing Snow Leopard guest

Posted: 18. Apr 2021, 09:38
by mpack
00:00:01.467421 VUSB: Attached 'HidKeyboard' to port 1 on RootHub#1 (FullSpeed)
00:00:01.467529 VUSB: Attached 'HidMouse' to port 2 on RootHub#1 (FullSpeed)
Make sure you have not enabled any USB filters. Integration with the host requires that the host continues to own keyboard and mouse.

VirtualBox is no different from any other host app: applications do not typically grab vital host hardware for their own exclusive use. The only hardware that a VM should own is hardware that the host can't use.

Re: Keyboard-mouse freeze installing Snow Leopard guest

Posted: 18. Apr 2021, 17:32
by Malbone
Thanks for the tip!

I didn't have any USB filters enabled -- BUT before starting the install, I had changed the USB controller from USB 2.0 to 3.0.

Changing it back to 2.0 allowed me to continue the installation.

That's on me -- I had tried to run Guest Additions but must have given up after several attempts to get the ISO file into a folder where it could be mounted under VB. Kind of a chicken-and-egg thing where you need drag & drop in order to run the program that allows you to have drag & drop. (It would be nice if VB grayed out options that cannot validly be exercised.)

Re: Keyboard-mouse freeze installing Snow Leopard guest

Posted: 18. Apr 2021, 17:48
by mpack
Malbone wrote:(It would be nice if VB grayed out options that cannot validly be exercised.)
How would VirtualBox know what options "cannot validly be exercised"? (I'm not even sure I know what that means).

FYI: Regardless of what template you based your VM on, VirtualBox has no idea what's currently on the disk image of a VM before the VM runs and launches the GAs (if any).

The only time most VMs settings can't be changed is while the VM is running.

Re: Keyboard-mouse freeze installing Snow Leopard guest

Posted: 19. Apr 2021, 01:06
by Malbone
I guess it's true that VB doesn't know what's on the VM volume, but it does know that when I created it, I announced my intention to create a Snow Leopard volume. Theoretically, it would be possible for VB to say, in that case you don't have the option to set drag & drop because it doesn't exist for your implementation.

Re: Keyboard-mouse freeze installing Snow Leopard guest

Posted: 19. Apr 2021, 10:00
by mpack
You asked for the default VM settings to be per a Snow Leopard VM, not that the settings should be locked that way. The settings dialogs are not frozen, you're allowed to make changes.
Malbone wrote:because it doesn't exist for your implementation.
Actually, it doesn't know that. It only knows that GAs are not provided by VirtualBox (*). In a more general sense, it doesn't know that settings chosen by the template are the only settings allowed.

(*) There are no official GAs for FreeBSD either, and yet they exist (unofficially). In fact MacOS GAs exist too, also unofficially. But those don't support many features at time of writing.