virtualbox.org

Hey Development Team.

When I fire up a guest machine in Virtualbox, the only indication that I have of which of the machines are running,
is the green arrow, and the caption that says: "running" next to it.

And sometimes, I actually need to "dive in" on the list, to check out which of the machines are running.

I was wondering, if you can change the green arrow to a background color on the specific machine area.
Then it will be more convenient (and clear).

If you can make this change, it will really be awesome.

Thanks.
green_butterfly.

Changing the background color vs the green arrow seems doable, but we on the forum wouldn't be able to do it. The devs would, and they probably won't, unless there's a massive groundswell of Virtualbox users that want it, and especially if the Oracle paying customers want it. (The paying customers will probably be the defining factor.)

Otherwise you could code this change yourself and re-build Virtualbox from the source code. The devs consider user code for inclusion.

This:

green_butterfly wrote:sometimes, I actually need to "dive in" on the list, to check out which of the machines are running.

would still have to be done if the background color changed, as opposed to just the green arrow.

I think a different solution would be useful. Vboxmanage showvminfo "vm name" outputs among other things the status of the named guest. In a batch file you can output this info to a disk file then find/grep/etc the file (or maybe in the command line itself without going to disk, Linux apparently does this easily, not sure about Windows) for the guest status. Then show some form of output pop-up displaying the status, and start the batch file from a shortcut. Vboxmanage list runningvms shows all running guests.

I prefer a simple sort by status of the box list in the VirtualBox Manager:

Literally something like 'SELECT * from boxes ORDER BY status, name ASC'
where the running boxes are shown first, then the saved/broken stopped boxes, then switched offed boxes.

and sort by type (linux, opensuse, debian, android, ..)

Something like 'SELECT * from boxes ORDER BY boxtype ASC, name ASC'