virtualbox.org

Hi all,
Have installed Linux Mint 12, and Virtual Box 4.1.8, with WinXP-SP3 installed as a guest o/s.
Problem is, I can't figure out the proper setup for the mouse and keyboard in the guest. They are plugged into USB ports (there are no ps/2 connectors) and work fine in Linux. But in WinXP they work for a short time, then lock/hang the guest o/s. I have tried various ways of defining them in the virtual machine to no avail -- the only one that seems to work at allo (though only for a short time) is a blanket generic default. The apps I have used for testing are just the standard games: freecell, spider. You get a few moves into the game and Windows locks up. I can 'uncapture' the mouse to get back to Linux, but not to the guest/app, where the mouse icon remains frozen in place.
Any ideas?
Cheers, Bob Harvey.

The mouse and keyboard are not USB devices as far as the guest is concerned, because they belong to the host and its irrelevant how the host connects to them. Just make sure that you don't have any USB filters enabled which might be grabbing them off the host. Disable USB support in the guest if you have to, to verify this.

You need to learn to distinguish physical from virtual. You have two (or more) PCs, one physical and the rest virtual. The virtual PCs use pretend hardware, and the hardware they pretend to have has nothing at all to do with what hardware your first (physical) PC actually has. For example, all of your virtual PCs have PS/2 keyboards and PS/2 mice.

If you run any other app on your host, do you worry about how that app will get shared access to your keyboard and mouse? No of course not - you let the OS and the app concerned worry about that. Well VirtualBox is exactly the same.