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Jon
Asked: 2013-06-24 07:10:04 +0800 CST

Win7 host, Ubuntu 13.04 guest: VirtualBox 4.2.14 seamless mode loses Ubuntu launcher

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I have Windows 7 as host running VirtualBox 4.2.14 with Ubuntu 13.04 as guest OS. All works fine in window or full screen. But if I try seamless mode, I lose the launcher on the left hand side. In fact, I can't see anything apart from any apps that had already been open.

I have installed guest additions.

Is this is a problem with VirtualBox or Windows or Ubuntu?

13.04

2 Answers

  1. That is exactly the expected behaviour of "seamless" mode where we only want to display the application windows of a guest OS on the host desktop:

    With the "seamless windows" feature of VirtualBox, you can have the windows that are displayed within a virtual machine appear side by side next to the windows of your host.Virtual Box Manual

    We should not run seamless mode for a Ubuntu/Unity guest where the application menu was integrated in the top bar (Unity default) and will not be accessible in seamless mode.

    To have access to the application's menu from seamless mode with Unity in the guest we may want to remove the packages responsible for the globalmenu:

    sudo apt-get remove appmenu-*
sudo apt-get remove firefox-globalmenu  # for Firefox
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  2. DO NOT run this while a VM is running. If you just want to just hide the status and menu bar for a better resolution, follow the instructions here:

    http://www.maketecheasier.com/hide-menu-bar-status-bar-in-virtualbox/

    To summarise, this command will probably work in your Windows host:

    “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe” setextradata global GUI/Customizations noMenuBar,noStatusBar

    If you need the status and menu bar back, run:

    “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe” setextradata global GUI/Customizations MenuBar,StatusBar

    You might not see the bars disappear until you log in. I hope that helps!

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