VMWare reporting a imaginary tablet breaks Qt for Mac client OS.

If a Qt app is installed into a OS X 10.5 Server virtual machine in VMWare Fusion, the GUI is not usable with mouse - i.e. no clicking or hovering is possible. Keyboard navigation with tab key works normally.

The mouse works in all other (native Cocoa) applications and of course for the operating system itself.

Output of the GUI has numerous lines like this:

QCocoaView handleTabletEvent: This tablet device is unknown (received no proximity event for it). Discarding event

In System Preferences, "Ink" item is visible, indicating that somehow the system thinks there is a tablet installed, though there is none.

VMWare seems to misreport the presence of a tablet in OS X.

The string reported is in qapplication_mac.mm, inside the globalEventsProcessor method.

One guess we have about this issue is that vmware is erroneously reporting that the virtual machine has a tablet, and Qt cannot recognize the "very virtual " tablet. When this happens, Qt prints that message and stop processing the mouse event.

If our guess is correct, there are two options, the easiest is to fix vmware so it doesn't think there is a tablet attached.

The other way is to convince Qt to ignore all tablet events, a patch for this would be to cancel out if statement that detects tablet events :

Changing the line in "qapplication_mac.mm"
from
sizeof(tabletEventType), 0, &tabletEventType);
if (tabletEventType == kEventTabletPoint) {
TabletPointRec tabletPointRec;

to

sizeof(tabletEventType), 0, &tabletEventType);
if (tabletEventType == kEventTabletPoint && false) {
TabletPointRec tabletPointRec;

will cancel out this check and probably restore mouse activities for Qt applications.