VNC / Spice issues from Mint Cinnamon desktop

[Craig McCormick]

Hi.

First post and I hope I'm not going to put my foot in it.

I'm a convertee from ESXi and have been learning the ways of ProxMox and its differences at a good rate. In a few days I think I've got y head around the different methodologies and philosophies.

However, I've been tripped up by what I see as an embarrassingly trivial issue and I'm close to pulling my hair out.

As the title suggests, I use Linux Mint (18.1, Cinnamon) as my desktop of choice, which I know has a far different GUI environment to many other distros. When I try to VNC (or Spice) to a VM, I get no mouse control within the VM. Keyboard seems to go through okay, but not the mouse. I think this is down to libX11 on the client side.

Has anybody else experienced this and if so, what is your fix or workaround?

I'm loving ProxMox itself, but the inability to properly work with VMs is causing me so much frustration.

 

[tom]

works here.

please post the output of:

> pveversion -v

and your VM config:

> qm config VMID

 

[Craig McCormick]

Hi Tom.

Thanks for the prompt response. Here's the details you requested. I should point out that the issues are present regardless of the VM, be that a migrated one (from ESXi) or a freshly built VM and the VM OS makes no difference. The issue only exists from Mint and not from Elementary OS or Windows. I have done a lot to isolate this issue down to the desktop OS. Mint 18 on both my main desktop machine and also on a laptop with completely different graphics card setup (nVidia on desktop, Intel on laptop).

I'm currently working from Elementary which is fine regarding ProxMox, but has other severe input issues of its own. I'll rebuild using Mint, shortly, to get back to what I initially described.

pveversion -v
proxmox-ve: 4.4-76 (running kernel: 4.4.35-1-pve)
pve-manager: 4.4-1 (running version: 4.4-1/eb2d6f1e)
pve-kernel-4.4.35-1-pve: 4.4.35-76
lvm2: 2.02.116-pve3
corosync-pve: 2.4.0-1
libqb0: 1.0-1
pve-cluster: 4.0-48
qemu-server: 4.0-101
pve-firmware: 1.1-10
libpve-common-perl: 4.0-83
libpve-access-control: 4.0-19
libpve-storage-perl: 4.0-70
pve-libspice-server1: 0.12.8-1
vncterm: 1.2-1
pve-docs: 4.4-1
pve-qemu-kvm: 2.7.0-9
pve-container: 1.0-88
pve-firewall: 2.0-33
pve-ha-manager: 1.0-38
ksm-control-daemon: 1.2-1
glusterfs-client: 3.5.2-2+deb8u2
lxc-pve: 2.0.6-2
lxcfs: 2.0.5-pve1
criu: 1.6.0-1
novnc-pve: 0.5-8
smartmontools: 6.5+svn4324-1~pve80
zfsutils: 0.6.5.8-pve13~bpo80


qm config 100
bootdisk: ide0
cores: 2
ide0: ds-B:vm-100-disk-1,size=64G
ide2: none,media=cdrom
memory: 2048
name: DT-OpenBSD6
net0: virtio=82:74:0C:31:05:8A,bridge=vmbr0
numa: 0
ostype: other
scsihw: virtio-scsi-pci
smbios1: uuid=de45d027-95a5-4d3b-bc2e-b38b2bce0bc1
sockets: 1

 

[tom]

you run an outdated version, pls upgrade to latest.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Downlo...Proxmox_Virtual_Environment_4.x_to_latest_4.4

and again, please post you VM config, you missed this in your reply:

> qm config VMID

 

[Craig McCormick]

Sorry Tom.

I noticed that and edited the post accordingly, probably while you were replying.

 

[Craig McCormick]

pveversion -v
proxmox-ve: 4.4-76 (running kernel: 4.4.35-1-pve)
pve-manager: 4.4-1 (running version: 4.4-1/eb2d6f1e)
pve-kernel-4.4.35-1-pve: 4.4.35-76
lvm2: 2.02.116-pve3
corosync-pve: 2.4.0-1
libqb0: 1.0-1
pve-cluster: 4.0-48
qemu-server: 4.0-101
pve-firmware: 1.1-10
libpve-common-perl: 4.0-83
libpve-access-control: 4.0-19
libpve-storage-perl: 4.0-70
pve-libspice-server1: 0.12.8-1
vncterm: 1.2-1
pve-docs: 4.4-1
pve-qemu-kvm: 2.7.0-9
pve-container: 1.0-88
pve-firewall: 2.0-33
pve-ha-manager: 1.0-38
ksm-control-daemon: 1.2-1
glusterfs-client: 3.5.2-2+deb8u3
lxc-pve: 2.0.6-2
lxcfs: 2.0.5-pve1
criu: 1.6.0-1
novnc-pve: 0.5-8
smartmontools: 6.5+svn4324-1~pve80
zfsutils: 0.6.5.8-pve13~bpo80

 

[Craig McCormick]

Hi again.

Just rebuilt my desktop with a vanilla Mint 18.1 - Cinnamon, installed Chromium from repositories and can't use the mouse within the console.

Can confirm that key presses are passed through to VMs, but not the mouse. The mouse pointer doesn't move in the VM and button presses have no effect. Same on VMs for OpenBSD 6 w/ xfce and on Windows 7 VM. I've also put my desktop directly onto the server network, so my firewall isn't interfering. This is definitely a client side thing.

It's just a standard MS USB mouse. As I mentioned, the console works as expected when used from Windows desktop and when using Chromium on Elementary OS.

Would greatly appreciate any suggestions as to how I can get this working or even just investigate further. I've gone around in circles and it is frustrating me to hell and back, as it's making ProxMox unusable, in terms of practical use of VMs. Okay, I can RDP into the Windows 7 VM and then use that to control VMs through their console, but that is some convoluted work-around. :/

 

[tom]

Your VM is an old BSD (name: DT-OpenBSD6)?

Try using a modern VM first, e.g. install Linux Mint as guest OS.

If you have problems in your Desktop OS, try different browsers, e.g. Firefox or Chromium.

If you try SPICE, make sure that you install the right client, see:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/SPICE

 

[Craig McCormick]

Thanks Tom.

virt-viewer does work, although left ctrl and left alt, nor shift F12 will release the mouse from the session. This is odd. I'll work it out from here though. BTW OpenBSD 6 was released less than six months ago, so it is "modern".