If you’ve been developing sites you probably have virtual machines and not just one. VMWare tools and related are a must have software in your developer toolbox.

Having multiple operating systems is a great way to test things and sometimes there’s a free solution that’s pretty good. For example if you want to convert pdf, doc files into text.

I have a Windows 10 Pro host and an Ubuntu guest Linux. After a certain update not sure if it was the VMWare Player or Windows itself I started seeing a constant and annoying layer that shows Caps Lock On/Off or Num Lock On/Off when I switch to the virtual machine. It’s distracting even though it shows up for a second or two.

The way to fix this is to go to the folder of your virtual machine and edit the file that has the .vmx extension. It’s like a ini file format and append the mks.keyboard.setHostLEDs value at the end of the file. Of course it’s good to turn off the machine and then make the change and boot it. 

This should be a minor change but I highly recommend that after you turn it off to archive the whole virtual machine folder so you have a backup of it. Then make the change so you're on the safe side. When I backup a virtual machine machine I use 7zip and do maximum compression.

It takes more time but will save you some space.

Solution

  • Turn off the virtual machine
  • Backup by archiving the virtual machine folder (7zip recommended)
  • Find the .vmx file
  • Append this line:
  • mks.keyboard.setHostLEDs = "FALSE"
  • Start the virtual machine
  • Share this article with your friends and colleagues and on social media :)

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