A Mac OS X, VirtualBox and Slackware 12.1
 

Since VirtualBox 1.6 is already officially available for OS X, I installed it and installed a fresh copy of Slack 12.1. The problem is I cannot get the X server running above 640x480. My Macbook uses intel gma x3100 integrated graphics and runs natively at 1280x800. What driver should I use and how should I configure my xorg.conf to run at 1280x800? So far I made it run with the vesa driver at 640x480.
Thanks in advance.

batev, VirtualBox present a FAKE video card to the guest OS, so your video card is irrelevant. It doesn't support much -- definitely not 3D acceleration (don't expect to run games on it). You'd definitely have to install the "Guest Additions" or whatever they're called (installing them involves loading a fake ISO [this is done automatically when you click the "Install Guest Additions" button from wherever it is] and running a script). I have heard of one person that got his VirtualBox installation of Slackware 12.0 in fullscreen, but he didn't provide any information. I don't have fullscreen resolution, but I admittedly haven't tried. You're going to have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (AFTER installing the guest additions -- they present a more capable video card to the guest OS) and try and get it to support full resolution. You may wish to run `xorgconfig` (or `xorgsetup`, but I don't know how well that'll work in VirtualBox) to automatically generate a working xorg.conf -- but I'm not sure if you'll get it to support the full resolution or not. I don't know what driver to enable in VirtualBox to get better-than-VESA resolution since it's presenting a fake video card to the OS.

I've been toying with VirtualBox for the last couple of days. I've got slack 12.0 guest running in a virtualbox 1.6 on a WinXP host which I've run successfully at both 1280x1024 and 1024x768 which is what I settled at.

The way I approached it was to use vga=791 in the lilo.conf to set the frame buffer size for the console and then use the sample slackware xorg.conf-fbdev to run X on top of that.

The advantage of doing it this way, is that the virtualbox screen window on your host display doesn't resize when you swap between X and the console.

This ought to work just as well on a Mac as its all done in the guest.


Hope this helps.



P.S. I've also been trying OpenBSD 4.3 on Virtualbox too, but it seems to be seg-faulting/coredumping all over the place. Slack on the other hand has proved to be very solid running under VBox.

It was hard to find the Guest Additions iso file in the vbox for mac package. But after installing the additions it seems I can run higher resolutions with the vbox driver. Thanks for the help.