Category: VirtualBox

kirsle

I don't know how I missed this, but apparently VirtualBox finally supports a "Scale Mode."

I've always wanted this feature. Why, you ask?

One easy example is for running an old operating system (older than Windows 2000) that isn't supported by VirtualBox, so that there are no Guest Additions for it. Guest Additions for supported OS's install extra drivers for the virtual machine, so that when you put VirtualBox into "Full Screen" mode, the guest OS will automatically increase its screen resolution to fit your display. When it can't do that, it will just display the screen at its literal resolution and put a black margin to fill in the extra space.

Here is an expertly Photoshopped demonstration of what I'm talking about. If you were running a Windows 3.1 virtual machine at an 800x600 screen resolution, and you put the VM full-screen, this is what it would look like on your 1366x768 monitor:

Another example: even on supported guests, running an older game like Starcraft (which runs in a resolution of 640x480) had this problem too: if the VM is running Full Screen and you start Starcraft... instead of the game's display stretching across your whole monitor, it stays at 640x480 pixels and is centered on the screen. This sucks.

So it seems VirtualBox has finally added Scale Mode (available in the "Machine" menu along side Full Screen and Seamless modes). There's one quirk to it, though: Scale Mode and Full Screen don't work together. On my system, going into Scale Mode put the virtual machine into a window on my screen. This window could be maximized, but it couldn't be made full screen. So that sorta sucks.

Luckily, my Linux window manager (xfwm4, the window manager of the XFCE desktop environment) supports putting any window full screen, whether the window wants it or not. This means the window decorations are taken away and the contents of the window are resized to fill the display. Success! I can now run full screen, scaled resolution guest operating systems.

Scale mode with xfwm4's full-screen option gives you a "native" experience.

Fedora 12 Final - Still No GNOME Shell in VirtualBox

kirsle

With no 3D acceleration, the results are the same as before: a mostly black screen, can't really do very much with it. With VirtualBox's 3D acceleration enabled, it's similar to the result I had before... very frequently the majority of the desktop (besides a box around my desktop icons) and the whole shapes of windows have that "striped" blue texture all across them.

I say most of the time because it's sometimes possible to get a window to show its true contents and become usable by dragging it around and playing with it for a bit, but the effects usually don't last very long before the window loses its textures again. The scale effect of bringing up the main menu in GNOME Shell usually fscks up all windows you have open again.

But the reason for this particular blog entry is that I also decided to test Compiz Fusion inside VirtualBox, on Fedora 12, under the same conditions as the GNOME Shell. I couldn't do this before because the beta version of Fedora 12 had some dependency issues, and Compiz conflicted with GNOME Shell; they couldn't co-exist together.

In Fedora 12 they can co-exist, and the Desktop Effects GUI window gives options to select either Compiz or GNOME Shell. Anyway, here's a screenshot. This is a real screenshot of Fedora 12 running in VirtualBox with full desktop effects active, including the 3D Cube effect.

Click for a full-size version of this screenshot

USB Sharing in VirtualBox (Fedora 11)

kirsle

I remember that the ability to share USB devices with virtual machines used to be working "out-of-the-box" with VirtualBox and older versions of Fedora, but Fedora 11 complicates things a bit.

By default USB devices in virtual machines don't work; the menu lists all your USB devices as being greyed-out while the machine is running. It comes down to a permissions issue with the user you're logged on as. To fix:

1) Make sure your user belongs to the vboxusers group. Older versions of VirtualBox made this an absolute necessity (virtual machines wouldn't boot otherwise), but VirtualBox 3.0 seems to only create this group but not actually require your user to belong to it for the most part. Update: with current VirtualBox, this is all that's required; USB should be working after you do this and log out and back in. If not, continue reading.

2) Create a mount point directory for usbfs (I did mkdir /usbfs as root).

3) Edit /etc/fstab to add a line that mounts usbfs, giving the vboxusers group write permissions to the mount point. In my case vboxusers had a group ID of 501; check in /etc/group to see what your group's GID is:

# VirtualBox USB support
none  /usbfs  usbfs  rw,devgid=501,devmode=664 0 0

Now, you can either reboot or run mount -a as root (to reload the data from /etc/fstab). If you had to add your user to the vboxusers group because it didn't already belong to the group, you'll need to log out and back in again.

And now your virtual machines can access the USB devices.