virtualbox.org

Some questions after experience with VirtualBox in a professional environment in a couple of installations and some existing experience with parallels. I did not find any comment on these topics in the user manual and in the forum.

VirtualBox 2.1.0
Host OS X 10.5.5 iMacs from 2 to 4GB RAM German
Guest Windows XP Pro SP2 German, additions installed

Clipboard between Guest and Host is working fine for text but not at all for images of any kind (in six different installations). Is there any way to change that? Is it planned to adress this in future versions?

To log into windows we have to use alt-cmd-del instead of ctr-alt-del (which worked with parallels). This is described in the user manual and is needed for PC hosts. On the mac there is no need for blocking this combination. Is there any way to change that?

Cmd-tab to switch between applications does work into VB but not out of VB, that seems to be blocked. The left cmd key is called the host key for the release of the mouse and keyboard, does this affect this behaviour?

I don't know why ctr-alt-del is blocked, but I can explain the behavior of cmd-tab. The reason you can't cmd-tab out of your virtual machine, is that when it becomes active, it takes over the keyboard and the keyboard is treated as if it exists solely in the virtual machine. Since the vm doesn't know it is virtual, it can't support switching to an external application. I hope that this helps.

CMD + Tab is not bugged. It is simply the case, that VirtualBox captures all "standard" keyboard input (read, the enhanced function keys are not captured) and sends it to the VM (that way CMD+Tab would result in the 3D window task switching under a guest Vista, which otherwise would not be possible).

If you want the VM to lose keyboard focus, simply press the "host key", which happens to be the left command key as a default setting in VirtualBox under OS X (you can change it) and then you can use the normal keyboard shortcuts (e.g. CMD + Tab for application switching).

I can't remember if that behaviour is the same with other host OS' (namely Windows with Alt+Tab) and I agree, that other Virtualization software for OS X does recognize the mac-specific keyboard shortcuts (well at least Parallels understands CMD + Tab) - but it is clearly not a bug.

It is debatable which behaviour is better - I'd say it would be nice, to have an extra option for recognizing at least CMD + Tab in future VirtualBox versions.

As a sidenote, mouse gestures (e.g. 4-finger task switch) do work, even if the VM has the focus.

I've just found the question I was looking for among other questions in this thread, although it had never been answered.

I'm currently using VBox 3.2.8, host MacOSX 10.5.8 and guest Windows XP with Guest Additions 3.2.8r64453.

And have the same issue reported above:

Clipboard between Guest and Host is working fine for text but not at all for images of any kind (in six different installations). Is there any way to change that? Is it planned to adress this in future versions?

Tests performed:
Opened IE in Windows XP and copied an image from a web page, which pastes correctly into Wordpad. Paste in TextEdit and OpenOffice in host fails = there is nothing in the clipboard.
Opened FireFox in MacOS and copied an image from a web page, which pastes correctly into TextEdit and OpenOffice. Paste in Wordpad in guest fails = there is nothing in the clipboard.
Text is copied correctly.

Is this going to be fixed at some point? Is there a workaround for being able to copy images between host and guest?

Seems like a very basic clipboard feature, and very annoying not being able to perform this.

Thanks

Forgot to mention above: clipboard is set to Bi-directional.