Headless RDP mouse tracking wrong [SOLVED]

[mattconnolly]

I've just installed Virtualbox 4.0.0 (Solaris) and setup a VM with Windows XP as a guest os.

I've guest VM is correctly set up and now running. But I have a problem using the RDP interface to it:

The mouse tracking is terrible. Basically, it's scaled by a factor of about 1.5. So if I move my mouse 2/3rds the way over the RDP connection window, the guest OS mouse has hit the edge of the screen. This also gets stuck in states where the VM mouse position has very little correlation to the mouse position of the RDP client, meaning that you cannot get the Guest OS mouse to the edge of the screen (really useful for things like menus...).

I've tried 2 different RDP clients, and both exhibit the same behaviour, which makes me think its a VirtualBox thing.

Has anyone else seen this?

-Matt

[Perryg]

Usually installing the guest additions (in the guest) will fix this.
If you do not plan to run the guest additions you should turn off the absolute pointing device in the guest settings and see if it works better.

[mattconnolly]

Thanks for the tip. Installing the guest additions does indeed fix it.

I had assumed that since I was running headless at connecting via RDP from another machine that there wouldn't be need for guest additions that all of that would have been managed correctly by the headless/RDP layer requiring nothing special in the guest OS. Not the case.

And in case anyone else needs to install guest additions in a Solaris headless vm, this is the command to attach the additions disk for Windows (check your controller port numbers):

Code: Select all

user@host$ VBoxManage storageattach WindowsXP --storagectl 'IDE Controller' --port 0 --device 1 --medium /opt/VirtualBox/additions/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso --type dvddrive

And then run the installer from in the guest OS.