virtualbox.org

I'm running PEUL 2.2.4 on a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop using OpenSuse 11.1. The guest is Windows XP SP3. It works very well when running KDE3, but on KDE4, not so much. Actually, it's fine on KDE4 as long as you leave the guest in a window. However, if you make the guest fullscreen (right-ctrl-F) or "integrated" (right-ctrl-L) trouble begins. The screen background goes to gray and your windows have no edges, decorations, controls nor even a title bar. The session is pretty much hosed from then on. If you switch back to windowed mode, the guest window has no edges, decorations, controls, title bar nor even, it seems, a functional window. The Windows taskbar, which I have placed at the top of the guest's display can be seen, but effectively nothing else -- not even the start menu if you click on the Start button. You do at least have the VBox menu bar available, so you can close the session cleanly by sending the shutdown signal.

I'm using 2.2.4 because the guest is NAT'ed and I share the common experience where network access is unworkably slow and unreliable and it doesn't look like I can bridge with the wireless adapter. I gather that VBox, at least V2.2.4, doesn't know enough about the KDE4 display to work and play well with it.

Any ideas, suggestions, fixes?

IMHO I think you will find that the problem is KDE4. I had KDE4 on my OpenSUSE for a while and the performance was as you say. Terrible! I installed a new copy of OenSUSE 11.1 Gnome and it works flawless. 3D effects and even with only 256Meg Ram and 10 Meg of Vram.

Very interesting Perry. I haven't tried to read the VBox source -- life has a way of using up time I'd happily spend on computing stuff, so I don't know how it does it, but it seems like VBox has to understand something of how both the host and guest desktops work in order to make everything work and play well together. Ironically, after some Googling and fiddling, I have successfully loaded openSUSE 11.1 as a guest running the Plasma/KDE4 desktop on my Windows Vista laptop and it works well, including virtual screen resizing, full-screen and integrated desktop mode. Even multimedia works pretty well, with some reservations, and I was specifically told not to expect multimedia to work. Kubuntu 9.0.4 running Plasma/KDE4 is also working, but audio and video playback are not quite as good. I haven't tried to migrate the openSUSE client to my openSUSE laptop (yeah, I have Windows and Linux laptops, I must be crazy) or my windows XP desktop yet, but they'll come soon.

Well, I'm sorry this post hasn't really advanced us towards any kind of solution, just delineated some of the limitations. I'm hoping someone can help enlighten us. Or perhaps a newer version of VBox will help, but I need for NAT to work right again first. Right now I'm kind of a jiky-jack hanging around here getting in the way, but if I'm eventually able to say something useful, then hooray!