Comment 4 for bug 996821

Adar: Beats me. I'm by no means an expert on how upstream determines what gets packaged where. I can tell you that the VMware devs have reverted the commit (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-input-vmmouse/commit/?id=2a321a39350aa020a8103813bed61ff559088195), but they haven't tagged or released that code yet.

Below are some instructions you can follow to rebuild the package that reverts the change. After doing this, your mouse should function properly. You'll have a new version of the vmmouse with the version string "12.8.0-1revert189dc266". It looks ugly, but hopefully if a fix is ever released the version string will be 12.8.0-2, and this quick rebuild will be overwritten. Let me know if I did that version string wrong.

Anyway, enter these commands in a terminal window. I suggest copying and pasting one by one rather than all at once, just in case one command fails:

# Install dependencies
sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts patch wget
sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

# Create directory to build in
rm -rf /tmp/vmmouse
cd /tmp
mkdir vmmouse
cd vmmouse

# Get the source debian package
apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

# Download the patch and apply it
wget https://raw.github.com/gist/2663977/2637b39e07ca2ed6620df7d137333c8e20afa6d1/revert-189dc266.patch -O revert-189dc266.patch
cd xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse-12.8.0
patch -p1 < ../revert-189dc266.patch

# Rebuild the package
debuild -us -uc

# Install it
sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse_12.8.0-1revert189dc266_*.deb