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From: Bela Lubkin <belal@sco.com>
Subject: Re: VMWare/ Mouse
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 07:50:25 GMT
Message-ID: <20040520075025.GR10272@sco.com> 
References: <34idnUOuCrY3KDfdRVn-jA@adelphia.com> <20040519030220.GN10272@sco.com> <mcadnQz0RKwl1zbdRVn-vw@adelphia.com> 


<darrinm@ga.prestige.net> wrote:

> I will eventually try the VMWare support route for my (legal) copy, but
> since they don't support SCO, I didn't expect it to be much help.

Understood.  You might be able to get a little leverage by mentioning
that this is a problem that other OpenServer users have run into on
VMware and it's been discussed on newsgroups.  Also feel free to direct
them to me (belal@sco.com) if a tech person wants to bounce ideas back
and forth.  I've made various overtures to them over the years with very
little result; maybe if it comes in from a mutual customer it will work
better...

>                                                                   I was
> really encouraged by your earlier posting on VMWare, so I thought I'd see if
> anyone had any new experiences.

I also was encouraged by the much better results with VMware Workstation
4.5.1.  So many details had suddenly improved, it felt to me as if
someone at VMware had sat down and specifically addressed OpenServer and
its quirks.  Only they didn't quite catch everything.

>                                 The mouse problem I have is exactly like you
> described. It goes to the right of the screen and all other movements are
> taken as right movements. Since I have seen this on real machines, I figured
> it was a SCO problem and not a VMWare problem.

That's entirely possible.  I've heard other reports of mouse problems,
not under VMware, but the descriptions are almost always frustratingly
vague.  3 reports of "the mouse goes crazy" could be talking about the
same issue, could be talking about utterly different behaviors with
different causes.  At least now I have that two different VMware users,
you and me, have seen identical symptoms.  Not surprising, though, since
the virtual machine environments should be practically identical.

If I had a working VMware installation (my free trial expired) -- I'd
be able to research it further.  I'm not going to pay my own money out
of pocket for this, nor do I feel like going through the Purchasing
rigmarole to get SCO to do it.  The research is on my own initiative
and not likely to be actively supported by my management, even if they
would conceptually agree that having OSR5 run smoothly on VMware is
desirable...

Next step on that path -- if I again had access to VMware -- do you (or
anyone else reading this) know how to get VMware to emulate an NMI to
the hosted OS?  It has menu items to generate power on/off and reset,
but I couldn't find NMI.  Their online FAQs and docs have a couple of
NMI references, but they were things like "Q: XYZ driver under PDQ OS
fails with an `unexpected NMI' error... A: use newer version of that
driver".

>                                                I could be mistaken on the
> exact key sequence to reset the mouse on the real machine, but it was
> something like that. It was found in some posting somewhere as a work
> around. Sorry for the lack of details, it's been a long time since I worked
> on that.

Well, if you come up with anything else, maybe the original reference
where you got the shift-cntrl-click trick, let me know.

>          I will try a serial mouse on com1 and see if it does the same
> thing. Any other suggestions would be helpful.

Not coming up with anything right now.  Serial mouse is worth trying.  I
doubt it will change anything, since VMware will be translating it all
to the same PS/2 mouse emulation.  I don't think VMware has options to
provide mouse input as an emulated serial mouse (or bus mouse for that
matter).  But this is the sort of doubt that should be tested, not taken
on faith...

>Bela<

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