SUSE 11.3 on VMware Workstation 7.1.3...some minor but annoying issues.

My workstation is a quad core Phenom-II 955 running slightly overclocked at 3.415 GHz. The video is an NVidia GT-240. I have 8 gigs of RAM and the host OS is Mandriva 2010.1, 32 bit, with a PAE enabled kernel.

I run VMware Workstation 7.1.3, 32 bit, in that Mandriva environment.

To satisfy the requirements of a client of mine (and to potentially satisfy some of my own future requirements which include migration to a 64 bit host environment and possible migration away from Mandriva due to the apparent death of that company), I have just deployed OpenSUSE 11.3 64 bit as a guest OS in VMware Workstation. I was a bit surprised that it worked because of the 32 bit VMware, but I thought I would try it. It did install and is working. I have installed VMware tools in the OpenSUSE system.

The system is working, but there are a couple of annoyances with it and I am wondering if perchance anyone else has seen these or knows of solutions.

First, and least annoying, is the fact that xorg appears happy to run without a configuration file, and tries to determine what it needs to know by polling the system at start up time. It fails to correctly identify the desired screen resolution and always start as an 800x600 display. I have set VMware to cause the display to automatically resize to fit the window size, and when I set VMware to full screen (which I usually do), I have to toggle from full screen to a window before OpenSUSE will resize the display to match the window size.

Further, when it performs this resize it is doing something funky, and fonts in some applications (though not all apps) come out the wrong size. The most visible problem is with the emacs editor; after the resize the nominal 12 pt font in emacs looks like it is at least 20 pt, and I have had to turn emacs down to 8 pt in order to get things sized right. Since I need this guest OS for development, emacs is very important to me.

So my first question is does anyone know how to get OpenSUSE 11.3 to open with a default 1680x1050 display, which is what I want it to use? Presumably a properly configured xorg.conf file would do this, but I haven't figured out how to generate such a file for a vmware video driver. More on this shortly.

The second annoyance, which again isn't huge, is that I can only get part of compiz running. The display driver (identified as "vmware") apparently is not capable of supporting direct rendering, and for this reason many compiz features don't work, including the cube, wobbly windows, and assorted other toys that I enjoy.

I've found a thread on the vmware forums that talks about a new generation graphics driver called vmwgfx which is supposed to enable direct rendering, 2D and 3D acceleration, and should enable the cube. When I modprobe that driver in, it seems to work in that I get a working display with it (though only after I toggle from full screen to a window which forces a screen refresh), but still no cube. The thread talks about some other libs that are needed, and I don't think I have all of those in place yet (this is a brand new installation, and some of those libs have to come from oddball locations and be compiled...I just don't have it done yet). So, presumably, when I get that done I'll have the cube.

The thread also provides an xorg.conf file and the thread author says that "you should make yours look something like this...", and presents a file with some obvious errors in it. When I use the xorg configure tool to generate a file, then alter it to look "something like" that one, X fails to start, claiming it can't find any working drivers. To this point I have not yet worked on that very much, but I'll ask here if anyone has a working xorg.conf file that uses this driver.

The third issue - and this one IS seriously annoying - has to do with mouse actions. At apparently random times, when I click on a drag bar with the left mouse button and drag a window, then release the mouse button, the release is not seen. I therefore cannot stop dragging the window around with the mouse until I click the right mouse button.

After I click the right mouse button, the window is released, but then the left mouse button is no longer seen, sometimes for several minutes. I don't have this pinned down to a clear set of symptoms, but I can move to other virtual machines (all Microsoft Windows variants) in the same VMware, and use the left mouse button. Then when I return to the OpenSUSE vm, sometimes the left mouse button works again and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is several minutes before I again can use the left mouse button. As you can imagine, that is very intensely annoying and will impact my work.

Does anyone here know what might be causing this and what to do about it?

It seems that xorg is implicated in one way or another with all of this since xorg handles the mouse too, so perhaps my solution is to come up with a properly functioning xorg.conf file. However, this is unfortunately non-trivial since it involves vmware drivers and the documentation of how to use those isn't the best in the world, beyond merely: "use this driver..."

If anyone has been down this particular road before and has a solution (particularly a working xorg.conf file that would work in this configuration) I would love to hear from you.

Well, I've made progress on the most annoying problem; the left mouse button "sticking down".

I found a fix which doesn't completely work but considerably reduces the pain.

In the guest OpenSUSE machine, in /lib/udev/rules.d, edit the file less 69-xorg-vmmouse.rules from this:

ACTION=="add|change", ENV{ID_INPUT_MOUSE}=="?*", ATTRS{description}=="i8042
AUX port", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/vmmouse_detect", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="vmmouse"

to this

ACTION=="add|change", ENV{ID_INPUT_MOUSE}=="?*", ATTRS{description}=="i8042
AUX port",KERNEL=="event\[0-9\]", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/vmmouse_detect", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="vmmouse"

Note that the 0-9 needs to be in square brackets and this site seems to not like that, so I escaped those square brackets with backslashes so that the editor would take it. When actually implementing this, don't use the backslashes.

This causes the problem to occur a lot less often, and when it DOES occur, I can make it go away by changing from full screen to windowed, then right back to full screen.

I think there is a race condition here someplace, and this "fix" is improving the situation but not eliminating it.

I'm having the exact same ANNOYING bug with mouse. I've applied your change to the 69-xorg-vmmouse.rules , hope it helps.. Because until now I've only had once choice - to make myself a cup of coffee , and wait for it to resolve.
Was even considering to change to another distro