Full screen resolution

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Mac OS X hosts.
Post Reply
Calion
Posts: 7
Joined: 25. Nov 2014, 00:58

Full screen resolution

Post by Calion »

I feel like I'm obviously doing something very wrong, but I don't know what it is. I'm running Snow Leopard Server as guest under a Yosemite host. What I want is for the guest display to take up the whole screen when I switch to fullscreen mode, but still maintain a reasonable window size when in windowed mode. How do I accomplish this? The Displays preference pane in the VM only shows one resolution, and I can't figure out how to change it.
loukingjr
Volunteer
Posts: 8851
Joined: 30. Apr 2009, 09:45
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: VirtualBox+Oracle ExtPack
Guest OSses: just about all that run

Re: Full screen resolution

Post by loukingjr »

There are no guest additions for Mac Client or Server guests so you can't use Full Screen. You can use a larger screen however.

from Chapter 3.12.1 of the users manual…
EFI provides two distinct video interfaces: GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) and UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter). Mac OS X uses GOP, while Linux tends to use UGA. VirtualBox provides a configuration option to control the framebuffer size for both interfaces.

To control GOP, use the following VBoxManage command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode N

Where N can be one of 0,1,2,3,4,5 referring to the 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1920x1200 screen resolution respectively.
OSX, Linux and Windows Hosts & Guests
There are three groups of people. Those that can count and those that can't.
Post Reply