I'm running Slackware 12.1 as a guest on a 1.6.2 Windows host. I built the additions and they are loading at startup (lsmod reports modules vboxadd & vboxvfs as loaded).

Problem is when I click in the window of the running Slackware guest, the mouse is not captured. That is, the host mouse disappears but the guest mouse will not move. I have to press the host key to release the mouse.

So it appears I have two problems. 1) why doesn't the mouse work and 2) why isn't it integratedd.

What I've tried/checked/observed

- The mouse section of the xorg.conf shows device "vboxmouse" and Options "CorePointer"
- I've unloaded the vboxvfs and vboxadd and the problem still exists
- the text based mouse doesn't work either (while in console mode)
- the mouse worked fine UNTIL I loaded the additions.

Any thoughts on what to try next?

Wouldn't you need the (VirtualBox) additions for Windows (if there is such a thing) to run guests under Windows?
I run VirtualBox under linux - and need to have those for linux installed.

No, gmartin is correct. When running Linux as a guest in VirtualBox, on any host OS, you need to Guest Additions for Linux in your Virtual Machine. VirtualBox presumably comes with everything to interface between the host and guest OS already, so no Guest Additions for the HOST OS are required. I have also found the guest additions for Slackware (and for other Linux guests too) to be a little finicky, and I just haven't cared enough (re: I don't use Linux distros in VirtualBox enough) to try to fix it. However, I would be (mildly) interested in solving the problem as well if you figure it out.

T3slider

Thank you for explaining that - I had obviously gotten it wrong.

I just read through the user-manual. Should have done that long ago...

Going to apply that newly aquired knowledge to actually install the guest-additions - which I thought I had installed.
Indeed I have them, just not installed ...

Thanks, T3. Part of my interest in solving this is because I want to build my nagios test machine in a virtual. The second is because it appears from my googling that not many have been down this path with Slackware. So if I can get it working and document it, all the better for those behindm me.

Thought you should know...


I built a new Slackware 12.1 virtual from scratch and rebuilt the additions. The mouse is working fine on the new machine.

Yeah, I was concerned. I've got *several* virtual machines here running in VirtualBox, and no problems at all. In fact, I built the two most recent kde4 package sets in a vm... :-)