virtualbox.org

Hello,

I've got an additional monitor attached to my Mac, where I display all my VMs. This has worked fine until I upgraded to VirtualBox 4.3.10 r93012. What happens now is whenever I launch my Linux VM, the Mac screen is blanked and the Dock is hidden. I have looked everywhere for a setting to avoid this behaviour, but come up short.. It is really annoying, because you need to be able to work seamlessly between the host VM and the guest VM without having to switch screens all the time.

Host machine: iMac 11,2 running OS X Mavericks 10.9.2
8 GB RAM

Guest machine: Linux Mint 15, VirtualBoxGuestAdditions v4.3.10 r93012.

Oh, and another extremely annoying thing about running VirtualBox on Mavericks, is whenever you launch a VM, VirtualBox shoots off another process that runs as a Dock icon. It is launched by launchd, runs as the user that's logged on the system, and doesn't respond, just sits there like a zombie. Also, if you terminate this process, it kills all your running virtual machines as well.

Has anyone else experienced these issues?

the "Zombie icon" yes. It actually shows up in Activity monitor and after few moments changes status to "Not Responding". It does go away once you close any guests that are open. I don't have a second monitor but someone else has mentioned the problem in a previous post.

UPDATE:

Obviusly, I'm having the same problem as fireman949 in a previous post..
Sorry, can't post URLs until I've had 1 post and been a member for 1 day!!

Anyways, the Mission Control settings do make a difference; "Displays have separate spaces" ticked means you can have your Mac native screen and the VM displayed simultaneously, but if the VM is fullscreened, you cannot put anything on top of it, as in an OS X window. The VM overlays the entire screen, regardless of which application is in front. BUT you do get the Dock, albeit being hidden. How useful is that? A hidden Dock that I won't make a lick of difference!

I'll keep testing.. If someone comes up with a workable solution, let me know please, this is driving me insane!!

Success!

The mysterious OS X preference ghost strikes again! It's obvious that when VirtualBox is installed, it either doesn't pick up the Mission Control preferences properly, or the Mission Control preferences aren't set properly in the first place. (Do it the "old fashioned Apple way: do it again!")

So once I had disabled "Displays have separate Spaces" in Mission Control, logged out, logged back in again, re-enabled "Displays have separate Spaces" along with "When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application", I'm now able to swap seamlessly between the VM and the running OS X native applications on the second screen.