Shared Mouse in VRDP with Multiple Connections

[gregdavisfromnj]

Tried searching before posting, but the plethora of VRDP posts might be occluding the answer I seek.

In short, the mouse cursor is apparently not shared across multiple RDP clients to the same VRDP server (a single VM).

I have set up a VM (Kubuntu 9.04 with guest additions) on a Windows host in Vbox 3.0.6. I have used the CLI to turn on VRDP and multiple connections for it. I can simultaneously connect to the VM from many Windows Remote Desktop Clients of varying versions of Windows and RDC using RDP. I can control the VM with mouse and keyboard from any client, even the Vbox client on the host. But, when I move the mouse in one Windows RDP client, or the VM on the host, I don't see the mouse move in the other clients. If I open a dialog via the mouse, the dialog does pop up on all clients. Highlighting text shows up on all clients as it is highlighted. Is it possible to get mouse input events in individual RDP clients to populate out to all the others?

What I really want to achieve is a classroom where everyone has visibility of a shared desktop (the VM with multiple VRDP connections enabled), and can steal control by simply using their "terminal" mouse/keyboard. So, seeing the mouse movements across all clients would be a powerful device for instruction, letting the students visually follow a train of thought.

My jaw dropped just to see Kubuntu work well in a VM for what I described, so hats off! I'll try to upgrade to the latest VBox version that just released, and try with Windows VMs to see if those make a difference.

Thanks,
gd

[Sasquatch]

I've just tried what you want to achieve, and I've got a solution for you. Disable the seamless mouse option. That means that you must click inside the VM to capture the mouse and hit the Host key to release it, as if you didn't have the GA installed. But, if you move the mouse inside the VM, it will also move in your remote desktop client.
This is tested with rdesktop on Linux. I can't test this with a Windows client unfortunately, due to some errors in the RDP client and VRDP server in VB.

[gregdavisfromnj]

Yes it did the trick. Turning off the seamless mouse, by disabling the mouse icon on the lower right status bar for the VM window on the host did let all the RDP clients receive mouse events from the the RDP session. Sometimes there was a local mouse and a session mouse, but that's closer to what I want. I tried with a Windows host, Linux guest, and multiple Windows Remote Desktop Clients.

A little off topic: I noticed that when running glxgears and 3D acceleration in the VRDP server VM, I got high frame rates as expected. But, the RDP clients saw blank windows where the 3D spinning gears were rendered in the Vbox guest GUI! I supposed that is to be expected as there is no hardware buffer into which the drawing area should be rendered in RDP clients. Maybe turning off 3D accel in the guest VM will further improve the mice interactivity.

Thanks for the help,
gd

[Sasquatch]

The interaction with the mouse won't differ all that much. It will lag a bit no matter what you try. It's just the delay you get with RDP, first the Host (in this case the Guest VM) will draw the video, then all the RDP clients will receive the data.

The GLX gears is an overlay window, those aren't passed through RDP properly, hence the empty window.