VMWare and keyboard input

This morning I fired my Windows XP VM on my mac and my keyboard input simply stopped working. After a couple of VM reboots, which had no effect, I did some googling. The first result suggested typing a few commands to determine what had disabled it:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. $ ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput
  2. |   "IOConsoleUsers" = ({"kCGSSessionSecureInputPID"=177,"kCGSSessionLoginwindowSafeLogin"=No,"kCGSSessionAuditIDKey"=0,"kCGSessionLoginDoneKey"=Yes,"kCGSSessionSystemSafeBoot"=No,"kCGSSessionOnConsoleKey"=Yes,"kCGSSessionUserIDKey"=501,"kSCSecuritySessionID"=11622192,"kCGSSessionUserNameKey"="gregstewart","kCGSSessionGroupIDKey"=20,"kCGSSessionConsoleSetKey"=0,"kCGSSessionIDKey"=256,"kCGSessionLongUserNameKey"="User"})
  3. $ ps auxwwww | grep 177
  4. user 177   7.8  9.2   652520 192788   ??  S    10:51pm  59:09.22 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -psn_0_110619
  5. user 1155   0.0  0.0   599820    464 s001  S+   10:44am   0:00.00 grep 177

According to the post the application that was blocking it was FireFox. "kCGSSessionSecureInputPID"=177 is the info you need to look for, where in my case 177 was the number I needed to use in the next command. Incredulous as I was, I closed FireFox and hey presto keyboard input was working again.

Hopefully this post will help others.

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Published:
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Author:
gregs
Category:
*nix, mac, os x, vmware