Mac OS X Host unable to go fullscreen on secondary monitor

[Kayvee]

My setup is as follows: I am running a WinXP guest on Mac OS X Mavericks host. It has been working very well for a long time now. I recently added a secondary display and intend to use it as a monitor for the VM. When I go to the fullscreen mode on the secondary monitor, it retains the resolution of primary display resulting in cutting off of the screen edges. I have tried several ways including the Cmd+G, Cmd+F, etc with no avail. Please help.

[socratis]

I didn't go into full screen at first, but I simply dragged the VM window to the 2nd display. I had "Auto-resize Guest Display (Host+G) enabled. My WinXP VM switched from 1280x1024 (on the 1920x1200 primary monitor), to 1280x981 (on the 1280x1024 secondary monitor).

The 1024-981=43 pixels of vertical pixel difference was occupied by the 21 pixels from the "window status bar" of Virtual box plus 22 pixels of the (empty_but_still_there) Mac menu bar. If I switch to Full screen, the guest resizes to 1280x1024. In both cases the settings were verified by the WinXP Display Properties.

VBox 4.3.6 on a Mac OS X 10.6.8, MBookPro 17" with Apple Studio Display 17" as a secondary monitor.

[Kayvee]

Socratis,
I could not have explained it better! Indeed, that is exactly what I am seeing... I have the exact same setup of 1920 x 1200 and 1280 x 1024 monitors. is this a bug?

[socratis]

No, this to me was expected behavior. It just so happened that the guest resolution (1280x1024) was close to the secondary monitor. So either VirtualBox or OSX (my guess is OSX) resized the window vertically to "fit" on the secondary monitor (positioned to the side of my primary monitor). When the guest was set to 1440x1050 and I dragged the guest the the edges of the 2nd monitor, it only clipped it vertically (1440x981). Horizontally it was extending to my 1st monitor.

As I said, this was the expected behavior. I'm not sure what you would consider irregular behavior for this scenario...

[Kayvee]

Okay, I see what you mean now... In my case, after I drag my VM window to the secondary monitor and maximize the window by clicking on the green + button, the window is resized to fit the 1280 x 1024 screen. The resolution of my WinXP is a little less than that to allow for the status bar, window borders, etc. At this point if I click Cmd+F to go fullscreen, the resolution of WinXP is increased in such a way that parts of the WinXP desktop are cut off from the bottom and sides (I cannot even find the taskbar on the screen). I tried all combinations of auto-resize, change resolution, etc. without any success.

[Kayvee]

After a little more fussing around... I noticed that I can have the VM in the secondary monitor in a Window mode at the right size. However, when I click Cmd+F, the VM becomes fullscreen on the primary monitor. At this point when I drag the entire fullscreened VM into a new 'desktop' space on the secondary monitor, the size of the VM is remains same as that of the primary monitor and does not change to the size of the secondary monitor. Is that expected behavior? What can I do to get the window resized to that of the secondary monitor when in fullscreen mode?

[socratis]

Yes, I had something like that happening to me to as well. The key, I believe, is due to how OSX handles things (I could be wrong). If I had "focused" on the secondary monitor, it went full screen on that one. But I also found that at the mini-toolbar of the VBox, it allows you to select which monitor you want it to go full screen... View -> Virtual Screen N -> (choise_of_M_physical_monitors)

[Kayvee]

Thanks socratis, that (...kind of) fixed it! Let me explain...
Now, I have the VM in full screen on my secondary monitor. WinXP was given a resolution of 1280 x 1024. However, Mac OS X wants to put the menu bar at the top which pushed the entire VM screen down a little bit. That basically made the WinXP taskbar hidden by about 80%. I fixed it by changing the WinXP resolution from 1280 x 1024 to 1280 x 960. Now, I have the entire WinXP VM screen visible on the secondary monitor... although ~64 pixels at the top are wasted.

I think it is indeed something that needs to be fixed by VirtualBox... after all Mac OS X apps that can go fullscreen are able to make the menu bar disappear.

[socratis]

Hmm... Something is wrong. If you go full screen, there should not be an OSX menu bar. This should happen only when you "maximize" the guest window. Are you sure you're not just hitting the green (maximize) button instead of "Host-F"? Full screen means what it says. A tell-tale should be the VBox mini toolbar at the bottom or top, depending on the guest settings (Settings -> General -> Advanced -> Mini toolbar).

[Kayvee]

Yes, I am in the fullscreen mode only. When I say the menu bar is present, it is actually not always present. In Mavericks, Mac OS X puts a menu bar in every screen. It is just greyed out on the screen that the user is not currently working on. So, when I am on the primary screen, I see a translucent, faded menu bar on the top of the WinXP VM. When I go to the secondary screen to work on WinXP, that translucent faded menu bar disappears. However, the space it was occupying is still just transparent and I can see my desktop wallpaper on it.

What's happening here is this (please see attached screenshot):

screenshot.jpg (71.85 KiB) Viewed 5415 times

VirtualBox decided that in fullscreen mode on my secondary monitor, 1280 x 1024 is the correct resolution. However, with the menu bar at the top, the entire VM screen is being pushed down. So, I changed the WinXP resolution manually to 1280 x 960. Then, VirtualBox centered the WinXP screen in the 1280 x 1024 area leaving a small black area at the top and bottom of the WinXP screen. You see that is why, the mini toolbar is not visible either. It is all the way at the bottom of the screen and not completely visible.

[socratis]

In Mavericks, Mac OS X puts a menu bar in every screen.

Aha!!! That seems to be the "difference". Mavericks! They did change the way they handle multiple monitors. Unfortunately in their own Mac-only way (who knows what APIs have changed). I'm not sure how big of a priority this is for the developers, but you may have to live with it for a while, until a 10.9-specific workaround works its way to VBox mainstream releases.

[Kayvee]

Those Apple Mavericks!
It is a little bit more inconvenient than I previously thought. VBox does not remember that I manually changed WinXP resolution to 1280 x 960. So I have to change it every single time. At this point, I have resorted to simply not using the fullscreen mode and leaving it in the window mode.

[Kayvee]

This fixed the issue for me:

Code: Select all

sudo defaults write /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/vmstarter.app/Contents/Info.plist LSUIPresentationMode -int 4
sudo defaults write /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app/Contents/Info.plist LSUIPresentationMode -int 4
sudo chmod 644 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app/Contents/Info.plist
sudo chmod 644 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/vmstarter.app/Contents/Info.plist

See http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12292