I am running parallels on a MBP Core 2 duo and I have a VM running XP, which runs very nicely, and another VM running Ubuntu Edgy, which has some problems: After a few minutes' running, usually if I am doing something X-org related, like moving or resizing windows, I lose the mouse and keyboard inputs; I can't type or click on anything in the VM, although I can stil move the mouse and I can use key combinations like ctrl-alt-backspace to restart the X server (or ctrl-alt-fn-F1 to get to a terminal). Restarting the X server gives me back the mouse and keyboard but I lose anything I was working on as I am effectively logged into a new session. Has anybody else suffered this problem?
I'm giving this one a bump I tried a fresh, clean install of edgy today and had the same problem. It makes it unusable for anything serious.
When in the linux VM, press ctrl+alt to release the mouse and keyboard. It isn't as seamless as the windows VM because it doesn't have the parallels tools that enables seamless mouse and keyboard integration. Parallels team, how about it? Any chance we can look forward to having those tools for linux VMs now?
I have no idea how Linux or Ubuntu works, but I solved this problem with XP by installing Tools before any drivers were installed by XP upon the first boot up after the installation had restarted and started going into the OS, finding new hardware. I cancelled all the requests to search for drivers, installed Parallels Tools, and then restarted. Both the mouse, keyboard, and video displays (including Coherence and changing screen resolutions) worked perfectly.
VMware FUSION (Beta 1), has Linux Tools included, and it works well - considering the whole things running in debug mode... So it MUST be possible! I find that without the Tools, Linux under parallels is a pretty miserable experiance. 303
Thanks for the replies, but these are all off-topic. I have found from other threads that you get unstable performance if you have memory set at 512MB or more. I set mine down to 384 and the problem has gone away.
Glad you sorted out your problem. However, the way you described your problem didn't suggest that this was a memory issue, so I would have never thought to look there. I usually set all of my VMs to 384 MB, and don't get any crashing issues that some posters are claiming. I'm not trying to brag or anything, it's just that with 1 GB of physical memory, I don't like the idea of giving the vm half of my memory when I'm using quite a bit of it for multitasking purposes. But that's just me.
I'm having this problem in 7.04 as well, with Parallels 3188, I can log in but then no keyboard, I can only delete text, but not type in anything new. Setting the VM memory to 500 MB didn't help, but setting it to 384 MB has. That's a step in the right direction, and will do for now, but will become a problem for me soon. I'm very impressed with Parallels, it's helped me get through a large chunk of my MCSE and was invaluable when I was job hunting because I could refresh and update my skills with technologies on Solaris, Linux, Windows and the Mac. However the limited Linux support will become a serious limit as my new employer uses Linux extensively.
Correction, I'm still having this problem even with reduced memory, it just takes longer to manifest itself. This is beginning to look unusable. EDIT: I'm not sure why, but this is working better for me now. I do still occasionaly get loked out from keyboard input, but releasing focus from the VM and then clicking on it again lets me continue, and it only occurs every 10 minutes or so which is usable but still annoying.
