Windows VM in Gnome-Boxes won't grab mouse or respect mouse movement

Question

I have installed a copy of Windows 7 as a guest in a Gnome Boxes VM. During install, it behaved normally, as do various Linux distros I have also set up as guests. Based on rules I can't fathom, all of these do one of two things with respect to the mouse - they will either:

• Grab the mouse when I click in the guest OS, so that it can't escape the VM window, and the text at the top changes from "Press and release (left) Ctrl+Alt to ungrab keyboard" to "... to ungrab" ; or
• Allow the mouse to leave, but have the guest OS cursor follow mouse movements while in the VM window

The Windows 7 guest does neither. I move the mouse inside the VM window, the host cursor vanishes, but the Windows cursor stays still and I can navigate by keyboard only. Interestingly, the same VM loaded through virt-manager (by pointing it at the appropriate drive image in ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes) behaves the same way, but a newly-created one in virt-manager using the same Windows install media appears to work properly. Is there a way to convince Gnome Boxes to do.. well, something sensible?

Answer 1

I had the same issue. Boxes was grabbing the mouse, but the cursor of the guest Win7 would not move. At the same time, however, keyboard was fully responsive.

I managed to fix it using the Spice Windows Guest Tools.

---

I also found bug ticket that I thought it might be relevant, but I couldn't test. The ticket is a bit old, and it refers to a WinXP guest, but the problem seems to be the same. Apparently the author solved it by installing virt-manager and setting up a USB mouse from there. Again, couldn't test myself it is relevant.