Strange video behavior in VB

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 at 20:40, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> I never use or even think of Visual Basic - my mistake.
>
> Yes, VirtualBox.

No biggie. It was obvious once I started reading the message -- but I
guess busy people might skip the message on that basis...

> Standalone v6.1.14...

OK. That's what I use too, except for Vagrant.

See Ralf's note, though.

> Guest.  I only reboot the host when I update and the update requires a reboot.

OK.

*The* primary troubleshooting technique for graphics/desktop display
problems on Linux is to switch to a text console and back. On X.11
that's Ctrl+Alt+[2...7] by default, of course.

But that switches the host, assuming you're running VBox on Linux. You
have not specified so I do not know.

So, use the host key + F2..F6. E.g. RCtrl+F2. Check it works in a
window, and then try it if full-screen freezes.


> The one that comes up by default is VMSVGA.  When I changed it to
> VboxSVGA and turned off the 3D acceleration, the Mint VM works fine,
> except it still can't seem to handle full screen mode or "maximized."
> I expanded the window to fill the whole screen and that works fine too
> - very strange.

Is this GNOME 3 in the guest? Are you using X.org or Wayland?

> From the built-in VB guest additions ISO that mounts on demand.

OK. May be worth trying the FOSS ones, as per my blog post. Remove the
ISO ones first, obviously.

> I tried that, in that order.  The results are as I described in my OP.

OK. Any difference if you turn _off_ 3D passthrough?

> I did not know that.  I hope it fits here - the Mint has Cinnamon and
> the Ubuntu has GNOME 3.

It's one of the main reasons I don't much like OpenGL desktops. E.g.
their performance in VMs sucks, and if you don't have working drivers,
the software fallback uses a lot of CPU.

An example of the Linux world copying Apple without due consideration.

Mac OS X almost never runs in virtualisation. Linux almost always
does. Hardware OpenGL doesn't work in VMs without special measures
that as you are discovering are not trivial. Therefore building
desktops that won't work well in VMs was a bad idea.

But GNOME, Elementary etc. are full of  such lacks of analysis. E.g.
an always-on top panel is central to both UIs, copied from the Mac OS
X design, as is not having menu bars in app windows. *But* the
developers apparently did not study Mac OS X, because the primary use
for the top panel is for a global menu bar. Neither GNOME 3 nor
Elementary supports a global menu bar; apparently they didn't think of
that. Therefore the top panel is vestigial and should not be there in
a well-thought-out design, and additionally, apps are crippled with
buttons in the fake title bar and a phone-like hamburger menu.

The whole thing reeks of poor design to me.

> I use a few KDE utilities, but I have never liked KDE - just not my
> cup of tea.  Others love it.

I agree.

> I'm sitting in the Ubuntu VM, expanded to full screen, waiting for
> something to show up.  The mouse cursor took a minute or two before it
> became visible, and after five minutes of typing this response, it is
> still blank (black).

Switch to a text console and back, just the same as you would if the
display got corrupted in bare-metal Linux.


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