Redhalo

Scripting
by

Mouse flicker in Kali VM

I recently bought a Lenovo YOGA slim 7 as my MSI GS60 2PL-005XFR is getting tired.

I undertook the re installation of my Kali environment : a newer version of VMware Workstation Pro (16.1.1) and the Kali Linux 2021.1 release have been installed.

But I experienced a bug, my mouse starts flickering in the guest OS. Very annoying.. As soon as I moved my mouse in Kali, the cursor just disappears and reappearts when the mouse stops moving.

I was looking first at at the open-vm-tools (and not at the VMware Tools anymore) but the latest version was already installed.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~]
└─$ sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop
[sudo] password for kali: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
open-vm-tools is already the newest version (2:11.2.5-2).
open-vm-tools-desktop is already the newest version (2:11.2.5-2).
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  libfuse3-3
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 540 not upgraded.

I found several posts on Internet with guys having the same issue like this one.

Then thanks to @mmassico for having posted the solution : he created a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf text file and disables the “HWCursor” option

--- FILE : /etc/X11/xorg.conf ---

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "X.org Configured"
    InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Keyboard0"
    Driver "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Mouse0"
    Driver "mouse"
    Option "Protocol" "auto"
    Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    ### Available Driver options are:-
    ### Values: : integer, : float, : "True"/"False",
    ### : "String", : " Hz/kHz/MHz",
    ### : "%"
    ### [arg]: arg optional
    Option "HWcursor" "off" # []
    #Option "Xinerama" # []
    #Option "StaticXinerama" # 
    #Option "GuiLayout" # 
    #Option "AddDefaultMode" # []
    #Option "RenderAccel" # []
    #Option "DRI" # []
    #Option "DirectPresents" # []
    #Option "HWPresents" # []
    #Option "RenderCheck" # []
    Identifier "Card0"
    Driver "vmware"
    BusID "PCI:0:15:0"
EndSection

After a reboot of my Kali VM, my problem was fixed!

//