Peter Cooper

How To Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy on VMware Fusion

I was having problems installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) under VMware Fusion but got to the bottom of it.

The next problem was trying to get the mouse scroll wheel to work. I did some Googling and most of the guides suggested I change a single line in xorg.conf (namely, set the “Protocol” of the mouse device to “ImPS/2″). It didn’t work. On a limb I thought I’d try changing the driver from “vmmouse” to “mouse” and this solved the problem, but the mouse tracking and acceleration was TOTALLY different between OS X and Linux.. eugh!

With some perseverance, I’ve found a solution. You can use the vmmouse driver, keep the synchronized mouse tracking and acceleration, and use your mouse wheel as it was intended.

I have been told this technique works on VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too, but I haven’t tried it on there myself.

Steps to Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion

Launch a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal).

Type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down (it’s not far, perhaps 20 - 30 lines) till you see a block that looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
[.. blah blah blah ..]
EndSection

Replace that whole section with this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Save the file, then close all your apps and hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. X restarts within a few seconds, and you’re back up and running. Scrolling should now be possible!

I haven’t gotten to the bottom of horizontal scrolling yet. I thought a ZAxisMapping of “4 5 11 12″ would do it, but I suspect either VMware Fusion’s mouse driver does things a different way, or maybe it’s mouse specific (not likely). I’ll update this post if I work it out.

This also works with VMWare Workstation 6.x. Thanks.

Works for me too, and I’m using VMWare Player on Windows XP.

Thanks a lot for the tip.

/Hubba

Thank you very much for this. It worked great.

Disabled my mouse entirely and can’t mouse into my Ubuntu virtual machine at all now.

Any ideas?

Actually, Peter, thanks to Time Machine I was able to recover a recent version of the Ubuntu VM and try again.

My xconf.org file looks different. I found that c&ping the section but changing “vmmouse” to simply “mouse” seems to work.

I don’t know why, but I have scrolling.

Les

If that works for you, that’s great I suspect VMware Fusion might not be virtualizing our mice as much as I initially thought. So it might be different techniques for different types of mice. I don’t use a Mighty Mouse, so that might be why.

Using “mouse” seems to more generally work with everything, but for some reason the acceleration and other characteristics of the mouse pointer seem to change significantly within the VM compared to OS X. With “vmmouse” I get the same “feel” both in and out of the VM.

So, did you get horizontal scrolling (HS)? I have a MBP and use touchpad for everything. I’ve trying to setup HS for my Ubuntu under vmware fusion via synaptics, but without success.
Keep the nice work.
Alan

Alan: No. While I use horizontal scrolling in OS X, my Linux use is casual enough to not require it.. especially as I mostly use in on OS X for file browsing, and the file browsers I use on Linux don’t work in columns!

That said, I know it has and can be done. I attempted to do it with a slightly adjusted ZAxisMapping but didn’t get a result with my particular mouse. It is worth investigating / Googleing ZAxisMapping as there are lots of other settings you could try.

I imagine a touchpad would yield different results to a mouse anyway, so it’s worth experimenting. It’s quick and easy to do so anyway, since a Ctrl+Alt+Backspace gets you refreshed and back up again in 10 seconds.

this works for the macbook touchpad. cheers mate!

[…] the mouse wheel was not scrolling properly.  After some searching I found the answer here.  Basically, you need to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.  Find this following […]

Oh dear lord, that fixed it. I was about to go crazy (Vmware server, XP).

thanks a lot for the great entries - this and the vmware tools for ubuntu 8.04 were of great help to me