Wireless mouse side buttons stop working after switching

Support Virtualization
1

I am setting up Win 11 on KVM for the fist time and I’ve noticed that my mouse side buttons lose functionality after switching from host to guest. I fist thought it was unspecific but it actually happens only on Win11. What would you advice to do?

2

I might be wrong in this case, as I’d assume you’d be able to map extra mouse buttons within Win11 e.g. for gaming mice etc., but I do have to report that my mate’s recently-acquired HP laptop, with Win11 pre-installed, presents rather sparse options for e.g. the Trackpad. You can’t even disable tap-to-click! :facepalm:

Booting from a Live Manjaro KDE .ISO revealed all the options M$ likes to hide from the user. :thinking:

Just my 2p worth. :wink:

3

I agree it is awful.

However I run it (Win 11) on Virtual Box and everything work fine.

I attempted to add new hardware in Virt-Manager selecting the correspondent USB Host Device, hoping I could get a more specific set up but I lost mouse control altogether.

1 Like
4

That might be the clue there, because as far as I understand it, VirtualBox (unless set up to do so?) doesn’t (always) directly access the actual hardware; rather with a translation layer? :man_shrugging:

With other methods such as KVM, I assume Windows is accessing the hardware (more) directly.

Help to edit the .XML file of a KVM machine
5

Upon further investigation, adding the the correspondent USB Host Device as piece of hardware already in use by a default component (the mouse) seems to create a conflict. The conflict persist while the guest VM is running, the cursor disappears and perhaps has a limited movements but the all buttons work.

That said, I thought maybe changing the XML info might help.
The newly added mouse as USB Host Device has the following XML

<hostdev mode="subsystem" type="usb" managed="yes">
  <source>
    <vendor id="0x1ea7"/>
    <product id="0x0066"/>
  </source>
  <address type="usb" bus="0" port="4"/>
</hostdev>

while the mouse as default hardware

<input type="mouse" bus="ps2"/>

But then I run in what it seems a bug, namely as root Virt-manager doesn’t allow to edit the XML information.
As non root if I try to modify the mouse XML I get the following

Error changing VM configuration: XML did not have expected root element name ‘input’, found ‘hostdev’

I’ll try to change it through virsh (after I figure out how vim works) and keep you posted