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Ubuntu 8.10 as a guest in VirtualBox

by Julien on October 27th, 2008

Though I only use Debian on all my machines, I like playing with new Ubuntu releases, just in case I have to set it up on someone else’s machine. I use VirtualBox for testing.

When trying the upcoming new Ubuntu 8.10 release, and after installing the VirtualBox clients on the guest, I had the following issues:

First, the video driver refused to give me more than a 800×600 resolution. This can be worked around by adding the following lines in the xorg.conf file:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Driver          "vboxvideo"
EndSection
 
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
 
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

A second issue was the mouse grabbing which did not work at all. Adding the following lines in the xorg.conf file has fixed the issue:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier   "Configured Mouse"
   Driver       "vboxmouse"
   Option       "CorePointer"
EndSection

You need to restart Xorg after amending the file so that the changes are taken into account.

Both issues are due to the fact Xorg 7.4 is supposed to automagically recognize the hardware – but it seems like this is not always the case (or it refuses to use it, not sure what’s happening in that particular case).

From → Weblog

8 Comments
  1. Tiago Faria permalink

    … and installing Guest Additions is always recommended too.

  2. Avi Rozen permalink

    The vboxvideo problem is probably Debian bug #490541

    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=490541

  3. Julien permalink

    Obviously, VBox additions are required (that’s what I meant with “VirtualBox clients”).

    And, yes, it seems to be bug #490541 regarding video driver. I guess the same bug should be reported for the mouse driver. Will have a look at it tonight.

    Cheers,
    Julien

  4. Julien permalink

    I had a look at this bug. It is only related to Debian packaging. As I use Sun’s VirtualBox packages (as well as guest additions, to benefit from the newest release), the bugs I have described might be different. I will check what I can find about this.

    Cheers,
    Julien

  5. Shek permalink

    Hi, I’ve the same problem but editing the xorg.conf didn’t resolve the problem for me:(

  6. Goran permalink

    Thank you, Julien
    My host is Ubuntu 8.04, virtualbox 2.0.4 on amd64, and I had the same problem. It did get solved by adding vboxvideo as a driver in xorg.conf. I didn’t experienced mouse problem – grabbing works OK.

    Goran

  7. Jim permalink

    I’m experiencing the same problem as Shek and Goran. Mouse grabbing works great, but I still can’t set my resolution higher than 800×600

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