I have a series of suggestions. We embed VirtualBox under a Sun OEM agreement as a client hypervisor on our secure mobile hard drive device on top of Mandriva.
As such the KDE environment is obscured from regular users and they only see the VM, full-screen,
Sometimes the screen resolution doesn't automatically register with the attached monitor or laptop LCD panel. The toolbar does have a feature to go between fullscreen and windowed, and there are hotkeystrokes that bring this up, but it would be good to have a slicker process [I am aware this may be host OS dependent to a degree, but read on].
Also it is a
huge annoyance if a laptop roams to a new WiFi router, because the user hasn't got access to
drakconnect There is the ability to enable or disable virtual network interfaces - but no way to interact with host WiFi. There can also be DHCP-related problems on WiFi and wired when a network connection changes, the VM doesn't always keep up.
[*]So - suggestions 1 and 2 involve allowing the administrator to
specify additional external elements to appear in the toolbar - I'm sure a
setextradata or
setproperty flag would do just fine, complete with the execution path for the add-in item and a sequence number where on the toolbar it appears.[/*]
[*]Suggestion 3 is control over
what does and does not appear in the toolbar compared with the pulldown menus in fullscreen mode. Examples of features I would want to suppress for end-users rather than administrators:[/*]
- Insert ctrl-alt-backspace [defiitely not one for Windows VMs],
Pause the VM [without a full suspend to disk this isn't much use in our environment], the same applies to snapshots.
Even the session information dialog isn't much good to the end user... but could confuse them a lot.
I would as administrator also want strict control over which CD, floppy, USB and shared folder options were shown.
I'm sure all these features could be contollable again by a setextradata or setproperty flag.
[*]Suggestion 4 is the inclusion of some
features which the
fullscreen menus can offer and the
mini toolbar does not. A particular nuisance is the dreaded
mouse integration [or lack thereof]. I would want to see a mini-toolbar option to fix that. Heck, why not a single click full-screen PLUS mouse integration![/*]
I have never understood why the
host key may only be defined before a VM is running.
Our default host key is F12 [which I immediately remap to Scroll Lock as soon as I start working!]. Leaving it on F12 is a huge pain during VM bootup because there's no way to get either to the boot "BIOS" and alter the boot order manually [something else I would want granular administrative control of] - but also PXE boot requires the F12 key under w2k8-WDS.
[*]Suggestion 5: The user should be able to
remap their host key - maybe temporarily - and the toolbar is the place for that. Maybe an "insert <homekey_name> button to allow a one-time use of the same key within the VM? Much more useful than insert CTL-ALT-BKSP ![/*]
[*]Suggestion 6 relates to Linux guests. Or maybe it's a question. How do I bring up the equivalent of Alt-F1... Alt-F12 or CTL-ALT-F12 in a guest without this going straight back to the host OS? Maybe this one is documented somewhere and I missed it. But again, the toolbar could allow for this if the guest is a Linux type,[/*]
[*]Final suggestion 7 would be a way to
control host mixer volume - my guests are often very quiet because they only have their percentage in the Windows mixer of the host ALSA mixer. [/*]
Also did you notice that if you select Session Information Dialog, or Shared Folders and the browse button, that the Alt-TAB key ignores the guest and interacts directly with host windows. This could be extremely confusing for end users who are unaware of the host OS, and are treating the Windows guest VM as an appliance [which is how it's supposed to work on our device].
I realise a number of these suggestions are going to be more specific to us than to others but then again, making the control of the toolbar more granular and embedding a few host elements like
drakconnect, maybe even
XFdrake and maybe even
Kmix - or their equivalents on other host platforms - could be really useful in many cases
Incidentally I notice that the "list item" bullet feature on this page hasn't worked so there are lots of [*] and [/*] elements!