Re: Improved virtualbox integration
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 15:58:48 +0200, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
> Let's look a bit closer at the two points above. The first point, updating the
> X configuration, seems to require a single change: The mouse driver should be
> replaced with the "vboxmouse" driver, to get mouse integration. X is already
> smart enough to choose the vbox video driver on startup, so that doesn't
> require any changes.
>
> I'm not sure what the best place to fix this is. From looking around in the
> initramfs scripts, it seems there is a hook in live-bottom that generates the X
> configuration by reconfiguring the xserver-xorg package (though I couldn't
> actually find the configure script from the package). The easiest solution
> would be to just run /usr/share/virtualbox/x11config.pl when it exists to
> update the config (from initramfs). This enables one to just add the
> guest-utils package to an image and make it work for virtualbox. OTOH, it will
> then no longer work without virtualbox, I think.
>
reconfiguring xserver-xorg doesn't do anything in current sid, so that's
not the way to go.
> I guess the proper solution is to make whatever generates the config in
> initramfs (live scripts? xorg config scripts? The X binary itself? Anyone got
> a pointer here?) also detect if the virtualbox mouse driver would be
> appropriate (and available). I'm not so sure if there is any current support
> for different kinds of mouses, or that just every mouse pointer is taken to
> support the "mouse" driver. Even better would be to do this without
> configuration, just let X detect this on startup (or perhaps let HAL do
> something here?).
>
If vboxmouse works with /dev/input/eventX, then the package containing
that driver can install a hal fdi to detect if it's running on vbox, and
set the input.x11_driver property to vboxmouse if so. See the
xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse package for an example.
Cheers,
Julien
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