
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!