KVM (kvm-qemu or Kernel Virtual Machine) Mouse Integration

KVM Home Page

KVM is an opensource alternative to VMWare or Virtualbox and I am finding I am using it more an more. One small annoyance has been the lack of “Mouse Integration”

During a recent IRC discussion of KVM, Rocket2DMn asked me if I knew anything about mouse integration on KVM as it seemed he had one guest with mouse integration.

Further investigation into his and google search (reading the kvm-qemu man page showed that mouse integration is indeed possible using the option “usbdevice tablet”.

If you are running KVM from the command line, simply add the option :

kvm -hda ubuntu.qcow2 -m 512 -usbdevice tablet

Alternately if you are using virt-manager, first stop your guest, then add edit your guest xml file adding a line for mouse integration.

< input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>

Note : I had to add a space at the front of the “< input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>” tag, remove it or you will get error messages.

Into your guest’s xml config file.

After manually editing your xml file, you need to restart libvirt

sudo /etc/init.d/libvirt-bin restart

Then restart your guest.