Routing the display of a virtual session to the F8 screen

[rallcorn]

Several years ago, I worked on a contract at a gaming company. Their IT department basically showed me the hardware room and said, "Build your system", and I built my workstation. Only mine was unique from the others ... I built a "tower", and put LINUX on it ... openSuSE Linux. But they then told me that we use Windows 98 for our workstations, so I installed VMware and set up Windows 98 in a virtual session, and it routed to the F8 screen. So, I could toggle between the two systems with a CTRL-ALT-F7 or CTRL-ALT-F8, respectively, and could toggle back and forth. I set up C:\My Documents to link through the system to my home directory on the LINUX box. At the end of the day, I plugged in a JAZ drive into the JAZ drivebay I installed in my tower, and backed up my system with a simple "cp -cpuv ..." command, and it took the latest and uploaded it to my JAZ drive, a whopping 1GB drive! (state-of-the-art back then)

Today, I have since moved to a 256GB mini thumb drive for my personal stuff, and a portable 4TB backup USB drive for the big stuff.

My question: I am setting up VirtualBox to run a Windows 7 session for the very few things I might need in a Windoz environment, and would like to be able to just toggle over to the F8 screen for my Windoz, and then back to F7 for my LINUX. Anybody know how to make that happen with VirtualBox, or any app for that matter?

-rAllcorn-


Richard A. Allcorn <rAllcorn@uucpnet.org>
KW7PTL ...a Ham radio operator too!
http://richard.allcorn.us

[Martin]

Just to "translate" your question
"Is it possible to redirect a VirtualBox fullscreen guest to a different/dedicated X display? (on openSuSE Linux)"

Which version and release of Linux are you running?

[socratis]

Doesn't Alt+Ctrl+F6/7/8 switch to a different TTY, or am I mistaken? Then this is something that really depends on your host OS/version and its capabilities, hence the question from Martin.

In theory, you could have your "normal" boot procedure, then switch to a different TTY and launch VirtualBox, then switch your VM to Full-screen mode (if it's supported). Pressing the HostKey once (to give the keyboard focus from the VM to the host), and pressing Alt+Ctrl+F8/7/6 should switch back to your "main" host display. It could work if your host OS supports it...