Sun xVM VirtualBox Seamless Windows

Let’s get to the point directly, when we start a new virtual machine it will be started in the new VirtualBox window. This main window in turn acts as a desktop for the guest OS, this way the guest windows are confined within the boundary of main VirtualBox window. Alternatively we can enable the full screen mode and complete host desktop will be replaced with the guest desktop. This reminds us that we are using the virtual machine. What if we don’t’ want to be reminded of this fact at all?

Background:

Ok, in my setup I have Windows XP host and Kubuntu as guest. I use Kubuntu to do development of my hobby projects for AVR microcontrollers. For some reason I was not able to access the emulator through VirtualBox. To solve this problem I used to compile the programs in Kubuntu and download them to my target hardware using Windows application. Needless to say that I have to constantly switch between the Virtual machine and main desktop. This was more cumbersome when guest was switched to full screen mode. Somehow I wanted to have the Bash shell window used for compilation (in Kubuntu) just next to my windows application (AVR Studio), so that I can switch between them just by clicking on the title bar.

Where There Is A Wish There Is A Way:

With VirtualBox Seamless windows mode we can do just what I wanted. That is it will hide the VirtualBox window and place the application windows owned by guest right on host’s desktop. As you can’t see  any evidence of virtual machine running, so you will not be reminded of it. To make it more clear let’s say you have same OS running on both host and guest, I bet you will not be able to differentiate between host and guest applications.

Virtual Box Setup & Requirement:

You can use seamless windows feature if you are using VirtualBox version 1.5 or above. You must also install Guest Additions to enable seamless windows. This information is correct for VirtualBox 3.0.2, for specific version please refer to VirtualBox User Manual for you version.

How to Get It Working:

From this point onwards I assume that you have installed guest additions and have already started the virtual machine. Also note that in following example my host OS is Windows XP and guest is Kubuntu.

Step1: Ok I will start with the windows desktop showing couple of windows applications running. In the snapshot below you can see that I have opened Windows Explorer, Windows Notepad  and Windows command prompt. The virtual machine is running as well but it is minimized. 

Host Desktop With Windows Applications

Step2: In the following snapshot I have restored the VirtualBox window. Inside VirtualBox windows you can see that I have opened Dolphin, Kate and Bash shell. If you look at this snapshot the guest windows are restricted within the Virtual Box window.  Our aim is remove this boundary.

Host Desktop With VirtualBox Maximized

Step3: Let the magic begin, Select “Seamless Mode” entry from the ”Machines” menu of VirtualBox window as shown below. It can also be activites by using shortcut key “Host +  L“

Enable Seamless Mode

Step4: VirtualBox will provide you with the information cum confirmation box, Click on “Switch“. I am sure after reading this blog you would also want to check the “Do not show this message again” before confirmation. The confirmation dialog box is shown below.

Seamless Mode Confirmation

Step5: Voila!!!, As you can see that VirtualBox will remove the background window and place the guest applications directly on host’s desktop. You can arrange them the way you want and switch between then with just a click of mouse. In the following snapshot I have arranged Dolphin windows just above Windows Explorer, Kate window next to Notepad and Shell window above command prompt.  I love it .

If you have taskbars for both host and the guest, taskbar corrosponding to selected window will get the focus automatically. In this snapshot you can see that Kubuntu taskbar is visible.

Host And Guest Windows Together

Step 6: Following snapshot shows that the desktop still belongs to the host (see final thoughts (1) below). You can see the windows context menu in the center and windows taskbar at the bottom.

Desktop Still Belongs to Host

Step7: To exit the Seamless mode you can either press “Host + L” or press “Host + Home” to disable it through “Machine“ menu. 

Final Thoughts:

1. You can not drag and drop between guest and host windows, That would be a great feature though. However if you drag the item from any of the guest application and drop it over desktop it will be copied on guest’s desktop.
2. You can start more guest application using its start menu or through bash shell and they will still be shown in seamless mode.
3. The keyboard will automatically follow the selected OS, for example if you have selected the Dolphin window, Windows Key has no effect.
4. In the seamless mode you can acccess the VirtualBox menu using “Host + Home” key.
5. Alt-Tab application switcher does not recognize guest windows but treat them as a single window.

That’s it for this post I like the way it works but if VirtualBox team can enable the drag and drop between Guest and Host and make the Alt-Tab application switcher aware of Seamless mode it will be perfect.

Links Related to This Post:

• VirtualBox
• My other VirtualBox related posts

Where are you Excogitator?

I know it was long time since I made a (quality) post on this blog, but I am very much around.

Well there are couple of reasons, the most important being cute addition to my family. I am blessed with baby boy and he is Seven months old now. So most of my free time was only for him.

Then I spent quite some time on understanding video encoding using mencoder and some other tools. It is really time consuming process to evaluate the encoders and profiles. You will read more on this over couple of months from now.

Ok, meanwhile I upgraded my home PC and my virtual machine on my laptop to Kubuntu 9.04 (Januty).  It’s awasome, it comes with Killer KDE4 user inteface which is great to see and easy to use.

Finally I also upgraded VirtualBox on my laptop to version 3.0.2

That’s all for now, stay tuned…

I will leave you with the footprints of my little one.

VirtualBox 2: How To Pass Through USB Devices To Guests On An Ubuntu 8.10 Host (From HowtoForge)

This short guide shows how you can pass through USB devices (such as a USB flash drive) to VirtualBox guests on an Ubuntu 8.10 VirtualBox 2 host. USB support is available only in the VirtualBox PUEL (closed-source) edition, not in the OSE edition, so make sure you have the PUEL edition installed.

via VirtualBox 2: How To Pass Through USB Devices To Guests On An Ubuntu 8.10 Host | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.

Sun xVM VirtualBox Goes 3D

Here is the great news for all VirtualBox Users. Virtual box team has released new version of VirtualBox 2.1.0. The main attraction for this release it Hardware 3D acceleration support.

This is experimental feature and support is limited to OpenGL after insalling guest additions, Refer to VirtualBox user manual section 4.8 Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL) for complete information.

Another attraction is support for 64Bit Guest on 32Bit Host, now that’s a pretty good feature I say, as I don’t have 64 bit machine.

Grab the latest version here.

Creating Virtual Machines For Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, and VMware Server With vmbuilder On Ubuntu 8.10 (From HowtoForge

vmbuilder is a tool (introduced on Ubuntu 8.10) that allows you to build virtual machines (with Ubuntu as the OS) for multiple virtualization techniques. Currently it supports Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, and VMware Server. You can afterwards copy the virtual machines to another system (a Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, or VMware Server host) and run them there.

via Creating Virtual Machines For Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, and VMware Server With vmbuilder On Ubuntu 8.10 | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.

Installing And Using OpenVZ On Ubuntu 8.10 (From HowtoForge)

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare an Ubuntu 8.10 server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

Please find the complete article here.

Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.

Installing Xen On CentOS 5.2 (i386) (From HowtoForge)

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.3) on a CentOS 5.2 system (i386).

Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called “virtual machines” or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers’ web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it’s more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

I will use CentOS 5.2 (i386) for both the host OS (dom0) and the guest OS (domU).

Please find the complete article here.

Credit for this post goes to Falko Timme.

Kubuntu 8.10 : Get Ready for Eye Candy

Yes its out now, Kubuntu 8.10 is released

After trying KDE4 on Kubuntu 8.04, I just can’t wait to get hold of formal Kubuntu release with KDE 4.  Its not only about looks though it has lot of improvements from nevigation point of view as well.

I am already downloading it. So go and grab your copy now

WinDirStat – Visual Disk Usage Statistics

This is continuation of my previous post on the similar tool KDirStat for Linux user. It is highly recommended that you go through the post here before going further as I will not discuss the common stuff again.

WinDirStat is windows replacement for KDirStat, as the original concept was taken from KDirStat they are almost same and do the same job. Following picture show the main window for WinDirStat.

WinDirStat Main Window

WinDirStat Features:

• The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
• The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
• The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.
• Coupling. Select an item in the directory list: The treemap highlights it; and vice versa.
• Zooming.
• Built-in cleanup actions including Open, Show Properties, Delete.
• User-defined cleanups (command line based).
• Works with network drives and UNC paths.
• ‘Create disk usage report’ option.
• ‘Submit bug report/Feedback’ option.
• Online help.
• setup.exe.
• Language can be set to Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Russian.
• Free software released under GPL

Links Related to This Post:

• My post on KDirStat for Linux users
• WinDirStat Homepage
• WinDirStat Latest Installer
• KDirStat Homepage

KDirStat – Visual Disk Usage Statistics

Someone has said that “A Picture is worth thousand words”. I completely agree with this statement when it come to determine hard disk usage. This requirement is even more prominent when you want to clean up your hard disk, if we know which directory occupies more space on hard disk we can concentrate on it for clean up. Similarly if we know which directory contains more number of files we might want to keep it defragmented to speed up the system.

There are many command line utilities that can provide this information du, dir, df etc. The problem with these commands is the results are not usable as it is either we need to sort them or combine them (to the level you want) and they don’t get the information is not relative to each other or total disk size.

What is KDirStat:

KDirStat is a visual disk usages statistic application for KDE users (Windows users please check out my post on WinDirStat here). This application scans the whole file system or given directory and displays the statistics both in numerical form as well as graphical form. See the picture below to understand what I am talking about:

KDirStat Main Window

Numerical view: As shown in above picture, top half of the image shows directory tree along with file size, percentage usage with respect to the total size in numerical as well as bar graph form, and last accessed date. The important part is if you go to the directory entry in this tree it will show the total usage of the directory including all sub-directories and files in them.

Graphical view: The bottom part is graphical view where each file is shown as a block, size of the block is relative to size of the file and space it occupies with respect to total size. Just like tree view all files in the given directory are grouped together.

Both the views are linked to each other, if you want to know space consumed by given directory, select it in tree view and corresponding block will be highlighted in Graphical view, If you see a huge block in graphical view click on it and tree view will point to the corresponding entry, this is very handy when you want to do system cleanup.

KDirStat Features:

• Graphical and numeric display of used disk space
• Different directory levels are shown in different colors
• Individual file in a directory are grouped together in <files> item to improve the readability
• Graphical view makes it very easy to find huge files
• Basic file opeartions can be done from KDirStat itself
• Synchronized graphical and numerical view
• Each block in graphical view is colored as per its file type
• Different types of graphical view
  • Plain
  • Squarified (no thin elongated rectangles)
  • Cushion
  • Colored
• Both the views can be zoomed to required directory level
• Predefined cleanup actions such as delete, archive
• User defined cleanup actions
• Lot of fun
• Free Software released under GPL

Links Related to This Post:

• My post on WinDirStat for Windows users
  
• KDirStat Home Page
• WinDirStat Home Page