Display goes black after some period (of inactivity)

[lunitix]

Hi there ,

There seems to be some strange issue with Virtualbox 4.0.2 were the display of the guest machine freezes , or to be more precise goes black.I haven't been able to pinpoint yet were the problem lies , if it is distribution related or kernel version of the guest machine.It seems though that it is Virtualbox that is unable to display properly as I don't get any failure or error inside the guest about the window manager .The guest is accessible by other means (ssh , response to ping etc. etc ) .

problem is noticed in Debian guests with Debian and Windows hosts! Set up is as follows

case A) Debian host running Debian guest
and B) Windows 7 host running Debian guest

In both cases the display goes black and does not respond to mouse or keyboard (feels like going into screensaver and never returning- to avoid confusions no screensaver is running in either guest ). In case B I have also a Centos host that works without problems.

Now if i restart the guest window manager , the display comes back .Also in case B I managed to get the display back by playing around with "auto-resize guest display" and "Adjust window size" from the VirtualBox gui .Strange!!!

In both debian guests kernel version is 2.6.32-5 (although different architectures: x86 and amd64) .

I will try to find time to compile a custom kernel and see if it is the kernel of the guest that's causing this .

In the meantime if anyone has a clue what might be wrong please jump in and help !

Thank you !

[fixedwheel]

you can use <host-key>+[F1] followed by <host-key>+[F7] to recover (<host-key> usually is right [Ctrl])



its a 4.0.2 bug, see http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=38222 and http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8122

download the updated guest additions iso from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and use it to update the guest

[lunitix]

Thank you fixedwheel for your quick reply and help !

I installed the updated guest additions and it seems to be ok so far.

On a sidenote , case A was running in headless mode so I tried passing the suggested key combination by running

Code: Select all

VBoxManage controlvm VMNAME keyboardputscancode e0 1d 3b e0 1d 41 

no luck though...

Again thank you very much !

Cheers !