Control: retitle -1 in VMware with open-vm-tools-desktop, XFCE becomes
unresponsive after repeated copy/paste
On Wed, 16 Jul 2025 at 08:13:03 +0000, David Kennedy wrote:
after a few Ctrl-C keystrokes it crashes something and I can't use my mouse or
keyboard, and worth noting that these open-vm-tools below weren't installed
manually by me
Aha, open-vm-tools (or probably in your case open-vm-tools-desktop)
sounds like exactly the sort of component I had in mind - I had expected
it to have vmware in its name, but it does not.
Please check the systemd Journal for information about what is crashing
and in what way, by running journalctl as root (use sudo or su).
Probably the easiest way is:
- install the VM with a blank root password (this will add your non-root
user to the sudo group, making it an administrator)
- when asked what tasks to install, add your chosen desktop environment
(XFCE?) and also the ssh server
- log in to the VM via ssh as your non-root user using their password
- in the ssh shell, run: sudo journalctl -f
- in the GUI interface, copy/paste repeatedly to trigger the bug
- everything that is written to the system log during that time will
appear in the ssh shell and can be copied into a text file
Your video seems to show the XFCE user interface becoming unresponsive,
which is not exactly a "crash"; it's possible that this is caused by
some component behind the scenes crashing, but it is not possible to
confirm or deny this by just looking at what is shown on the VM's
virtual monitor.
Another useful debugging step would be to remove open-vm-tools and
open-vm-tools-desktop from the VM:
sudo apt purge open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop
then reboot the VM and try to reproduce the bug. If you cannot, then
that would be evidence of a problem with open-vm-tools. This will break
some VMware features (like clipboard sharing with the host machine) so
ideally you would not need to do this, but it provides a data point.
I don't use VMware myself (most Debian developers probably do not) so
this will probably have to be investigated further by someone who does.
If the log has evidence of a problem with open-vm-tools, then this bug
can/should be assigned to that package.
smcv
