Mouse grabbing in VMWare...

Yesterday I was setting up a new VM under VMWare Workstation when I noticed that mouse grabbing was not working. Now I use my VMs extensively, so I expect this feature to work as it slows productivity when it doesn’t. After digging around, I found that the VMWare Tools installer hadn’t modified the xorg.conf to handle the mouse. It turns out that they released the Xorg drivers as open source and now they’re maintained by the Xorg team! So, in this case, I fired up Synaptic and installed the vmmouse input driver, modified the driver line in my xorg.conf to be ‘vmmouse’ instead of ‘mouse’, and restarted X. Tada! I now have mouse grabbing without having to start the vmware-toolbox.