Resizing guest window renders desktop inaccessible (Mint 14)

[antimatter84]

Hello,

I am using VBox 4.2.12 and Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon, 64-bit). Host is Win 7, 64 bit.
Resizing the guest window or switching to full screen mode resizes the guests resolution as well. But lately, this causes the desktop not to be accessible anymore. This means, the desktops context menu won't show up, there is also no selection rectangle (when dragging with LMB pressed) and all the desktop icons are gone.

This problem does not always occure on the very first resize, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 resizes (or switches to full screen).
Restarting Cinnamon from the settings applet does not repair the desktop. A complete reboot is required, in order to restore the functionality of the desktop. But resizing the guest window or switching to full screen will crash it again.

This problem can be observed with fresh install of Linux Mint 13 and 14 (both 32/64-bit), as well with all Mint updates and/or guest additions installed. I also tried VBox 4.1.20: same story.

I don't even know, where to look in order to solve this problem. Can someone help me?

Kind regards,
Andi

[Perryg]

It appears to be a cinnamon issue at least that is the only DT manager that I see this in. Use the host+backspace hot-key to get back to a login screen and see if gets you back in. That said there are improvements from Mint and VBox that are helping this due in future releases.

[antimatter84]

Hi Perry,

thanks for your time.
That is, what I am suspecting, too. I installed Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity and I could not reproduce the described issues.
Then I installed Cinnamon, logged in, resized the guest window and the desktop crashed again.

Testing a live session with Mint 13 + MATE and it seems to work fine and desktop survives several resizes. So for now I use MATE with VBox as I only need an appliance with preinstalled stuff for a day.


Andi

[DamagedCoconut]

I also tried Mint, and had the same problem. At one point I found that if I stretched the guest window and used Auto Resize Guest Display, it would work, but then the Display settings on Mint kept reverting to 'Disabled' - and if you rebooted the guest, the desktop would come back at some ridiculously thin strip. Eventually the desktop came back white, and thereafter I could do nothing.

I had a similarly unfortunate result from Sabayon.

The VBOX display driver from Guest Additions seems to only offer 4:3 screen sizes, which is a terrible waste on modern, widescreen monitors... I would really like to see some widescreen resolutions, and then I would be able to choose one of those and would no longer have to fight to get more screen real estate.