Just connected an external display to my 17″ XPS laptop to try out the new dualscreen support in VirtualBox 4….
I installed 4.0 last week and I’ve had some crashes so far, but nothing that caused a problem; I’ve had guest-hangs during resets and reboots, when the VM (not guest) was about to restart and head for BIOS… That means that I haven’t lost any data, just had to CTRL-ALT-DEL kill the VM from the host…
Now the good news
From the changelog one can read “Guest Additions: support for multiple virtual screens in Linux and Solaris guests using X.Org server 1.3 and later”. I connected my external monitor and changed my VM settings to use 2 screens. At power on I get two displays, one that stays black while BIOS jumps by and Linux runs it’s init-scripts. As soon as the login (gdm) prompt appeared I had mirroring between the screens. “System>Preferences>Monitor” and BAM, dual screen :)
I’m running Windows XP as host and I’ve got Ubuntu 10.10 as the guest.
The only thing I’m missing now is 2D acceleration as moving big windows (Google Chrome and Terminals) leave a shadow for 1/10th of a second… And there’s the usual VM lag between keyboard input to screen feedback…
This is now a lot better then what VMware could provide in the multi-head department…
