Improvements to seamless mode

[rokujou]

I've been a VirtualBox user for quite some time now and I've got my virtual machines to a state where they run well with very few issues. However, there is one feature that I've longed for since booting my first Windows Guest OS -- true seamless integration. The first time I saw a feature like this was with Windows Virtual PC's Windows XP Mode, which ran XP applications almost completely transparently in Windows 7, going as far as integrating them into the host start menu and completely hiding the guest desktop.

VMWare's Unity Mode is very similar to Windows XP Mode in that windows are integrated more properly into the host operating system's window manager. For instance, a window can be moved between workspaces, appears in the task switcher and task bar and supports proper z-ordering. VirtualBox's seamless mode, whilst rather nice and definitely appreciated, pales in comparison, although seems noticeably faster.

Are there any plans to bring these features to VirtualBox as improvements to the guest additions? Running Windows applications on Linux can be tedious, which is why Wine is so great because it almost completely removes Windows from the equation. From my point of view, I don't want to run Windows on my Linux host, but I do need to run Windows applications that aren't compatible with Wine. I realize that it is possible to do all this using SeamlessRDP, rdesktop and special configurations for VirtualBox, but the guides I've seen for accomplishing this seem very complex.

EDIT: just found #10597 on the tracker, seems to be pretty much the same request.

Cheers,

Andy

[mpack]

Truly seamless integration is quite easy if you only support one host OS, and one guest OS. Harder if you support a wide selection for both. Bearing this in mind, you might like to consider the substantial difference in intent between "Windows XP Mode" and VirtualBox.

[rokujou]

Indeed, I can imagine it's a difficult task and not at all as simple as supporting one OS, but for many users the intent will be the same as with XP Mode: run an unsupported application in a different OS. I'm sure you can understand, the developer's intent and the end user's intent aren't always the same (perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying there). VMWare's Unity Mode does something very similar to XP Mode with its own equivalent of guest additions, which I imagine would be handling a large portion of the work involved. If VMWare can do it, I'm sure VirtualBox could do it just as well, or even better.

Just saying

[Mykroft]

I'd really love to see this happen too. I really like VirtualBox overall and I really enjoy using the Seamless integration on my Windows host to my Windows guests. However, having a second copy of the taskbar is a bit annoying. In VMWare, the integration is truely "seamless", in that each task shows in the taskbar along with my host tasks. That's really the only thing I dislike about VirtualBox that I'd like to see it adopt from VMWare's Unity.

I agree that not every host/guest combination makes sense for this, but for those cases where it does make sense... it would be a great improvement to the product!!

[mpack]

Go to the download page, get the source code, get busy...