[arch-general] Upgrade to Linux 4.17.2 & xorg-server 1.20.0-8 breaks left-mouse in remote Linux desktops

David C. Rankin drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com
Mon Jun 18 22:43:12 UTC 2018


All,

  This is a strange one, confirmed on two separate Archlinux Guests running in
VirtualBox on Archlinux Hosts. I access the running VMs with rdesktop over the
LAN. After update to Linux 4.17.2 & xorg-server 1.20.0-8, VirtualBox-5.2.12
starts the Archlinux guests fine, X starts fine in the guests (running
fluxbox), and pressing the right-mouse brings up the fluxbox-menu fine, but
there is no way to select an item with the left-mouse.

  The left-mouse click seems to be taken as an escape closing the menu without
actually selecting anything. It is as if the left-mouse (and cursor position
in general) isn't seen at all (there is no highlight in the menu when the
mouse moves over an item)

  Thankfully, the fluxbox designers made the menu respond to keyboard inputs,
so after bringing the fluxbox-menu up, I can up-arrow/down-arrow to an xterm
entry and open an xterm by pressing return.

  When the xterm is open, there is no way to grab the title-bar and move the
xterm around, again, as if the left-mouse input isn't seen. An moving the
cursor over the bottom of the window will not bring up the taskbar.

  This effects Linux guest, but not windows guests. I can start Win7 in a VM
and opening in remote-desktop works just fine. (all mouse buttons work fine
and the cursor position tracks properly bringing up the auto-hidden taskbar on
mouseover)

  Can someone with a similar VirtualBox setup confirm this behavior? I suspect
it would effect any Linux Guest that runs X and a desktop and is accessed with
rdesktop. For all practical purposes this update prevent accessing Linux guest
with rdesktop.

  I start my virtual machines from a simple bash script using:

exec VBoxManage startvm arch_1_64 --type headless

(I doubt that makes a difference, but for completeness)

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.


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