Guest machine display issue

[piratestatic]

YES I REALIZE THIS IS A TOPIC COVERED COUNTLESS TIMES ON HERE! Okay now that we have that out of the way, the next thing that most people will ask is have you researched this? Yes...how else would I know that it is covered on here multiple times. Next there is the well why did you not do what all was said in those post...well there is the issue...most of them are very specific to which OS the user has, down to the exact model of computer even that it makes it impossible to find a "step 1 do this and step 2 do this and step 3 you are done" list of how to fix the issue.

Now for the meat and potatoes:

I have Virtual box 4.3.20 r96996. I am on a Macbook Air (13 inch mid 2013) MacbookAir6,2 I am running OSX Yosemite 10.10.1 and my "host" screen resolution is 1440x900 on an LCD display.

No matter what OS I am running in VirtualBox they all display at about 640x480 and when I am trying to work on one of them it gets super annoying whenever I try to use more than one window at a time on the guest screen. When I go to full screen mode all it does is makes the grey surround turn black and stretches the guest screen to be marginally larger but not really increasing the desktop size as much as just making things visually bigger. Can someone please help me fix this issue or even point me in the right direction of where to read. I am not against looking for the answer on my own but in this instance I have exhausted all I know to do.

[Perryg]

During all of your reading you seemed to have failed the part that we need to know what the guest/s are and to post at least one of the guests log file ( as an attachment ) so we can all be on the same page. FIrst thing that comes to mind is guest additions but that also depends on what it is you are trying to run.

[loukingjr]

I agree with Perryg that it is most likely a lack of installed guest additions in any of the OSs you've tried. I also think in all your reading and research you would have read you need the guest additions installed.

[piratestatic]

I tried the guest additions route and maybe I did something wrong but it didn't seem to work. I didn't list which OS because that seemed to be irrelevant since it does it with all OS's regardless of which OS I install.

Right now I am trying to use Kali LInux, Windows 8.1, Elementary, Fedora, Linux Mint, and Peppermint 5. All of them have a desktop display that will vary in size but for the most part it is about 640x480 (for a relevant frame of reference this is about the size of an index card) I think Windows is a little larger but no where near 1440x900.

If you need the log file can someone walk me through how you get that? Perryg and loukingjr thank you for your help this far.

[piratestatic]

here is a Vbox.log I saved...I am going to assume this is what you guys are looking for. If not please point me in the right direction so I can get what you need so you can help me.

Again thank you for helping me.

[loukingjr]

There are no guest additions installed in the guest of the supplied vbox.log. Also there is no extension pack installed which you would need for USB

Also the guest OS Type is incorrect. It should be Debian (64bit)

There are no guest additions installed in the guest of the supplied vbox.log. Also there is no extension pack installed which you would need for USB

Also the guest OS Type is incorrect. It should be Debian (64bit).

The memory is overcommited...

00:00:09.470696 Host RAM: 4096MB total, 1765MB available
00:00:09.520403 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000080000000 (2 147 483 648, 2 048 MB)

[piratestatic]

Okay so what do I need to do? I am not understanding what you are asking for.

[loukingjr]

Okay so what do I need to do? I am not understanding what you are asking for.

What you need to do is read the users manual on how to install guest additions or Google search it for the hundreds of examples including YouTube videos.

[piratestatic]

Okay I will come back to this after some more research.

[mpack]

Step 1: Reduce the VM memory allocation to 1GB (you have to shut the VM down first).

Step 2: Install the Linux guest additions, carefully following the instructions given in section 4.2.2 of the user manual.

[piratestatic]

Thank you, I have been reading the user man to try and understand what all is going on under the hood a little more. Installing the OS is the easy part...getting it to work seamlessly is harder. I don't mind reading, it is just easy to get lost and frustrated when you are doing everything you can think of and not getting solid results back.

[loukingjr]

Generally speaking Windows guests are slightly easier to deal with as far as the guest additions are concerned. Linux guests often need extra packages installed before you can install the guest additions. Different versions of Linux require different packages although DKMS and the headers for the running kernel should be installed. There are also packages such as the compiler, GCC, make etc. One of the biggest problems I see is people assume they know what should work as opposed to what is needed.

[piratestatic]

One of the biggest problems I see is people assume they know what should work as opposed to what is needed.

I am not assuming I know what works, I am just looking at what my host system has and what the minimum requirements are for x system and meeting somewhere in the middle of bare bones what is needed and what I have to offer from my host.

[loukingjr]

I meant "people" in general.

As far as guest requirements, the RAM should be set to approx 50% of the available RAM on your host. The number of cores should be set to no more than n-1 cores but usually half the number of cores is best. I assume your Air has four cores so I wouldn't assign more than 2 for the guest.

With a Mac with 4GB I wouldn't try guests with much more than 1GB RAM assigned.

In general 32bit guests have smaller memory requirements than 64bit guests so you might want to stick with those.