Mini-toolbar some suggestions how-to improve

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abcuser
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Joined: 10. May 2007, 20:03
Primary OS: Ubuntu other
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Mini-toolbar some suggestions how-to improve

Post by abcuser »

Hi,
there is new interesting option mini-toolbar in Vbox 3.0.0. But it can get annoying when mouse is accidently moved over "hidden" mini-toolbar.

I suggest to add the following options:
1. Option to place this mini-toolbar at top like VMware Player has or left, right site and/or
2. make an option that mini-toolbar is fired out only if some key is pressed like <CTRL> when mouse is moved over mini-toolbar and/or
3. Make a keyboard shortcut to show mini-toolbar.

Regards
lpcustom
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Joined: 5. Jul 2009, 22:57
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Re: Mini-toolbar some suggestions how-to improve

Post by lpcustom »

Please change this. I completely agree. At first, I thought, "cool they added a toolbar like VMware", even though I don't use the toolbar at all. Within seconds, I was annoyed by the placement of the bar. I run VM's in fullscreen more often than not, and I've always like using the short-cut keys to do so. The toolbar gets right in the way of the Windows taskbar on the guest machine. The feature isn't really needed. I'd like to have the ability to disable it completely.
Perryg
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Re: Mini-toolbar some suggestions how-to improve

Post by Perryg »

lpcustom wrote:Please change this. I completely agree. At first, I thought, "cool they added a toolbar like VMware", even though I don't use the toolbar at all. Within seconds, I was annoyed by the placement of the bar. I run VM's in fullscreen more often than not, and I've always like using the short-cut keys to do so. The toolbar gets right in the way of the Windows taskbar on the guest machine. The feature isn't really needed. I'd like to have the ability to disable it completely.
Well you do have the ability to disable it. Shutdown the guest and click settings, under general / advanced take the check mark out of mini bar.
While you are there you might as well look around for the other neat things that you can turn on and off.
mike.merrett
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Joined: 24. Jul 2009, 14:14
Primary OS: Mandriva
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Re: Mini-toolbar some suggestions how-to improve

Post by mike.merrett »

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!
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