Solved Mouse cursor won’t move in VMWARE Fusion and Freebsd 14.3 Stable

almostunix · Jul 16, 2025

Install goes perfectly with Fusion on Apple M series laptop using FreeBSD 14.3 Stable (Arm64 version) works excellent using the text terminal.

MouseD is set to yes and a cursor appears on the terminal but won’t move.

Upon installing KDE Plasma 6(X11) a mouse cursor is available at login screen but won’t move.

Wondering if anyone else is having this issue or just use a different hypervisor?

almostunix · Jul 17, 2025

almostunix said:
Install goes perfectly with Fusion on Apple M series laptop using FreeBSD 14.3 Stable (Arm64 version) works excellent using the text terminal.

MouseD is set to yes and a cursor appears on the terminal but won’t move.

Upon installing KDE Plasma 6(X11) a mouse cursor is available at login screen but won’t move.

Wondering if anyone else is having this issue or just use a different hypervisor?

looks like this is an issue with VMWare as others have had the same issue with Win11 and Ubuntu.

marq · Jul 17, 2025

Do you have emulators/open-vm-tools installed in your FreeBSD guest?

almostunix · Jul 21, 2025

marq said:
Do you have emulators/open-vm-tools installed in your FreeBSD guest?

Yes, that is one of the first things I tried :/ I tried different versions of FreeBSD, e.g. curent(v15), stable(v14) and release(v14). also tried a USB mouse and it didnt behave any differently (it doesnt appear as a seperate device to Fusion)

almostunix · Jul 21, 2025

Added ums_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf and the mouse is now fully functional. (This assumes open-vm-tools is already installed).

This thread can now be closed but I would suggest a mention in the virtualization section of the handbook as much googling has found this to be a very common issue.