Keyboard becoming unresponsive in Virtual Box VM

[John Smith]

This is happening under Virtual Box in Slackware 15.0. Since the
VM is Debian 11, this may be more a Debian kind of thing, but Slackware
people seem to be more savvy when it comes to such technical details.

I have this Debian 11 VM running Xfce. I killed the screensaver
and power manager daemon in this Xfce session, for I have no need for
them. When I left this sit for a while (maybe half an hour or so) on
trying to do so the keyboard is completely unresponsive in this VM. Only
the keyboard - the mouse is still working fine.

The thing is, when I elicit a software keyboard from Virtual Box,
by doing Input -> Keyboard -> Soft Keyboard at the Virtual Box menu in
the window where the VM is running, I can type characters all right in
the VM - for example, into a terminal emulator already running in that VM
- and from that point onward I can use my real keyboard in that VM
without any problems - until such time that I stop using it for half an
hour or so again.

This seems to point in the direction of some issue with Virtual
Box itself. Any ideas?

[Chris Elvidge]

Post by John Smith
This is happening under Virtual Box in Slackware 15.0. Since the
VM is Debian 11, this may be more a Debian kind of thing, but Slackware
people seem to be more savvy when it comes to such technical details.
I have this Debian 11 VM running Xfce. I killed the screensaver
and power manager daemon in this Xfce session, for I have no need for
them. When I left this sit for a while (maybe half an hour or so) on
trying to do so the keyboard is completely unresponsive in this VM. Only
the keyboard - the mouse is still working fine.
The thing is, when I elicit a software keyboard from Virtual Box,
by doing Input -> Keyboard -> Soft Keyboard at the Virtual Box menu in
the window where the VM is running, I can type characters all right in
the VM - for example, into a terminal emulator already running in that VM
- and from that point onward I can use my real keyboard in that VM
without any problems - until such time that I stop using it for half an
hour or so again.
This seems to point in the direction of some issue with Virtual
Box itself. Any ideas?

AIUI, it's a problem with the (x and) xfce screensaver(s) in the virtual
machine. Remove them both (from Debian), don't just disable them.

[John Smith]

Post by Chris Elvidge

Post by John Smith
This is happening under Virtual Box in Slackware 15.0. Since the
VM is Debian 11, this may be more a Debian kind of thing, but Slackware
people seem to be more savvy when it comes to such technical details.
I have this Debian 11 VM running Xfce. I killed the screensaver
and power manager daemon in this Xfce session, for I have no need for
them. When I left this sit for a while (maybe half an hour or so) on
trying to do so the keyboard is completely unresponsive in this VM.
Only the keyboard - the mouse is still working fine.
The thing is, when I elicit a software keyboard from Virtual Box,
by doing Input -> Keyboard -> Soft Keyboard at the Virtual Box menu in
the window where the VM is running, I can type characters all right in
the VM - for example, into a terminal emulator already running in that
VM - and from that point onward I can use my real keyboard in that VM
without any problems - until such time that I stop using it for half an
hour or so again.
This seems to point in the direction of some issue with Virtual
Box itself. Any ideas?

AIUI, it's a problem with the (x and) xfce screensaver(s) in the virtual
machine. Remove them both (from Debian), don't just disable them.

Thanks. The thing is, no screensaver is running in the Debian VM.
How would the presence of those components cause such problem if they are
not running?

[Henrik Carlqvist]

Post by John Smith
This seems to point in the direction of some issue with Virtual
Box itself. Any ideas?

I know of a user which wasn't using Slackware and VirtualBox but running
Ubuntu and qemu. He got some trouble with the keyboard. It finally turned
out that the trouble went away when he switched from wayland to Xorg.
Could it be that you are running wayland? If so, would it help to switch
to Xorg?

regards Henrik

[John Smith]

Post by Henrik Carlqvist

Post by John Smith
This seems to point in the direction of some issue with Virtual
Box itself. Any ideas?

I know of a user which wasn't using Slackware and VirtualBox but running
Ubuntu and qemu. He got some trouble with the keyboard. It finally
turned out that the trouble went away when he switched from wayland to
Xorg. Could it be that you are running wayland? If so, would it help to
switch to Xorg?

It is running X:

root 482 0.1 5.1 604852 104100 tty7 Ssl+ Dec11
3:34 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -
nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
xyz 859 0.0 1.6 240688 32772 ? Sl Dec11
0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/panel/wrapper-2.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-
linux-gnu/xfce4/panel/plugins/libnotification-plugin.so 10 16777226
notification-plugin Notification Plugin Notification plugin for the Xfce
panel

I ended up disabling all screensavers both in the Debian guest
and in the Slackware host, and the problem seems to have disappeared.
Since the Slackware host is a headless one, which is running a TigerVNC
session which I access from a different Slackware system, maybe the issue
is a combination of TigerVNC and Debian. Anyway, since a screensaver is
superfluous in a TigerVNC session, I'll take this solution.