virtualbox.org

When Vbox is running with one of the VMs active (in example below Debian but the same happens with any other VM) MacOS 10.14 dock shows - (1) - Vbox GUI icon, (2) - active VM icon:
When VM is shut down the icon changes to represent generic Vbox icon:
When clicked I would expect the VM to be started again, instead it throws the error:

Don't include [img] tags to 3rd party images, they won't render. The least you can do is to "Preview" your post. Always attach the images locally. So, please edit your post and attach the images here, locally.

I can't reproduce the problem on 10.11.6. Can you remove all VirtualBox icons from the Dock after a computer restart/remove icons/restart, and try again? Does it still happen?

OK. I have edited my original post to fix images - sorry for that. Not posting on this forum too often - still learning.

The recent apps area on dock feature was only introduced in 10.14.

I think you could try to reproduce this behaviour in previous macOS versions by making dock icon representing running VM permanent - right click it and then in options set "Keep in Dock"

Not sure how easily this can be solved...

• VirtualBox uses the "VirtualBoxVM.app" to start a specific VM, which is passed as an argument from the command line.
• OSX simply points to the app. No arguments.

It seems that we are at an impasse which can't be solved. OSX simply can't have arguments passed to an application, and VirtualBox can't work without that, at a fundamental level.

The only solution is to prevent OSX from showing the recently used applications in the Dock: https://www.macworld.com/article/328451 ... ticle.html

Yes. Only option would be redesign how VMs are run on MacOS - instead of as separate app they could run as subprocess of main VBox one (this is how VMware does it)

But obviously it is not something high priority IMHO.