virtualbox.org

Hi,

Am I doing something wrong? I keep reading in past topics on these forums that if I shutdown my Linux guest, that VirtualBox should remember and when I restart the VM and login again it should re-enable seamless mode automatically. This just doesn't happen for me - I always have to manually switch it to Seamless mode.

This is with a fresh install of:

VirtualBox: v4.1.18
Host OS: Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 64-bit
Guest OS: Debian Testing AMD64 (Wheezy) with KDE Desktop (configured to auto-login my user)

Is there any way I can force VirtualBox to start in seamless mode?

Thanks,

Sam.

The question I need to ask is how are you shutting down the guest? If you shut it down *while it is in seamless mode, it should start back up in seamless mode.
When you shut down the guest it writes the information to the guests control file (*.vbox) but this happens each time you shut the guest down. So it will read the state of the last shutdown.

I've tried using both the standard Shutdown option in KDE and also sending an ACPI Shutdown signal through Virtualbox. I notice it does swap back to the non-seamless mode during the VM's shutdown, but I can't think of any other sensible way to shutdown the machine.

Sam.

Unless it has to do with KDE (I don't use it) I don't know what to tell you. Do you have a guest with some other DT manager installed and does it show the same results?

Hmm ... but AIUI all Linux servers switch back to the console before shutting down. The desktop environment / X server are just regular services which are shutdown as part of the whole machine shutdown process. When that happens, the virtual machine /has/ to go back to the console - so I don't see how changing the desktop environment would help. If you run Gnome or some other desktop environment, can I ask what you see when you ask the server to shutdown? Does yours go back to a window when the X server has been stopped?

This used to work OK when I used a similar VirtualBox configuration a couple of years ago, it's just that I've only just recently re-deployed everything from scratch with the latest versions.

The other option I've tried is to try to Close the VM and select Save the Machine State whilst the GUI is still running - but when I re-run the VM, it comes back up as expected and does try to go into Seamless Mode but none of the applications or taskbar are visible. I have to exit Seamless Mode to see everything again, and then re-apply Seamless Mode, which then works as expected.

Sam.

Well I tried it just now to see and it worked for me but I use Linux as host and that might be an issue. Since you use Windows host maybe we should wait for a report from a Windows as Host person to verify your issue.

Tried which? Shutting down a Guest Linux VM? Or Saving the Machine State? If the former, did you see it return to a regular window as it shut down the X server?

Sam.

Both. shut down returns to the window to shut down and when started starts with a window and then resumes seamless after boot sequence. Saved state works as you stated.

Ah, right. Thanks. Maybe it's a Windows host thing. :/