Hello, I’m not sure why but after latest updates I got this weird “mobile like” text selection. When I select any text anywhere on whonix I get a magnification of the text and when selected I get the options to copy / cut the selected text, I find it odd cause I never activated it myself. Can someone knows how to disable it ?
Yes @Patrick
I also register for forums for this issue
After today update my Machine is behaving like it is touch screen tab or laptop
Mousepad behave weird like touchscreen features
So is Thunar
And also no highlighting of mouse context menu and no highlight on system wide menu
I temporary solved it by disable mouse integration , after disabling mouse integration it get normal and on enabling it again behave like touch screen machine
Tried updating guest addons and also checked with downgrading kernel nothing works no perms fix
Most probably issue is in new version of kloak
Regards
Exactly, I got those issues too. Also for example in the mousepad app I can scroll a long text as if I were swiping up and down with a touchscreen device. Which mouse integration exactly you disabled to make it disappear? I got two kloak , vm mouse integration and generic mouse, disabling some makes my mouse clicks not work anymore. It’s not a huge deal but it bothers me not being able to disable this.
Disable mouse integration from Vbox i guess view menu
So this issue is only in mousepad / thunar?
Options until this gets fixed:
- Use a different text editor. I wasn’t able to reproduce this issue using
kloak. - Use a different file manager.
- You could Stop Kloak until restart or reboot.
I don’t understand.
That sounds like a mouse middle click feature.
Stopping Kloak fix this issue
The issue is in mousepad , Thunar and on desktop or file manager’s mouse right click menu (have to click to activate an item in menu) it not auto select (highlight item in menu ) same behavior like in touch screen ecosystem … in apps where we have to select or edit text this issue appear there usually
It behaved like a touchscreen machine
How to downgrade kolak to previous version ?
Exactly , but it’s not right mouse . I can do that in mousepad just with left clicking while holding and moving up and down in a blank space. The issue is also on the gui , if I rename a file on desktop and select the text that weird magnifier comes out as well. I also tried to download a fresh whonix installation and it still happens right of the bat.
–EDIT–
I tried to stop kloak and all those problems disappears, so I can confirm kloak is the problem.
Did a lot of debugging to figure out what was going wrong here. Turns out this is a limitation in GTK. There should be a solution that we can deploy in kloak.
What’s happening is that kloak creates emulated devices that are basically “wrappers” around actual input devices. kloak does its magic by taking events coming from real input devices and emitting them via the emulated devices it creates. In order to allow the system to distinguish between kloak’s emulated devices and real devices, kloak sets the name of each emulated device to kloak output device. This is a recent change, and was done while adding the ability for kloak to restart itself any time a new real input device was connected (thus cloaking newly-attached devices along with ones present at startup).
The problem with this is that VirtualBox emulates a USB tablet in order to allow mouse integration to work. This tablet looks like a touchscreen, and the only reason GTK doesn’t treat it as a touchscreen is because it has a hardcoded list of device names that it recognizes as “looks like a touchscreen but should not be treated as one”. One of those device names is virtualbox usb tablet. VirtualBox’s mouse integration would be treated as a touchscreen device if it wasn’t for this check, but GTK sees that the “tablet” is really from VirtualBox, so it doesn’t treat it as a touchscreen.
This is where things become a problem. When kloak runs, it creates an emulated input device for VirtualBox’s USB tablet that has all the same features as the USB tablet, and thus also looks like a touchscreen. But the name of this new “touchscreen” is kloak output device, which GTK does not have in its hardcoded list of “don’t treat this like a touchscreen” devices. Thus GTK sees the kloak output device, sees it has the features of a touchscreen. and proceeds to treat it like a touchscreen, resulting in touchscreen-specific features being enabled like text magnification.
So that’s the source of the bug. The solution for now is probably going to be to add code to kloak that detects when it is running in a VM. If kloak is running inside of a VM, it can choose to not rename the emulated device it creates, but instead preserve the name of the device it wraps. That way GTK will see kloak’s output device as being a virtualbox usb tablet or something similar, and can treat it properly. This will break dynamic device detection inside VMs, but most people don’t pass through physical input devices to their VMs as far as I am aware, so it shouldn’t be disruptive. Users who do pass through USB devices into Whonix can just restart kloak when they do so.
2 Likes
Unsupported.
Information for developers:
Information for developers:
This issue has been fixed thanks to @arraybolt3. I’ve tested and uploaded the fixed package to all Whonix repositories just now.
This will be fixed as soon as the user installs standard updates (Operating System Software and Updates) (Whonix is based on Kicksecure, hence linking to Kicksecure documentation).
1 Like
Thanks you @arraybolt3 and @Patrick
Issue has been resolved with new update of kloak
Bundle of thanks
Ps:- for using kloak now we have to enable kloak input from mouse settings or it work systemwide on any selected input
No manual user action required.