Thursday, December 27, 2012

Solving erratic mouse behavior in Ubuntu 12.10 inside VirtualBox

My Ubuntu installation within a VirtualBox VM has been nearly unusable due to random, erratic behavior of the mouse cursor. Problems have included:
  •  a click near the middle of the screen activates a button in the launcher on the left side
  •  occasional hits on the exit button of a window, though the cursor was far from it
  •  inability to drag to select text; the selection would jump upward while I was trying to drag down
  •  other dragging operations would create unpredictable and unwanted results

I did research and found these two references:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/202789/cursor-jumps-when-moving-and-some-other-times
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=51727&start=45

Based on these, I typed the following into the terminal.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:a7x/bug1041063
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core

My initial tests show this to be a successful fix for the problems listed above.