Seamless mode for a VirtualBox virtual machine combines the desktop of the VM with the desktop of the host OS. The taskbar (or panel) of the VM is positioned just above the host OS taskbar. Windows for the VM appear as if they are normal windows on the host OS desktop. The windows for the VM still behave like those for the guest OS and have the same window decorations. This also seems to assume rectangular windows and I've had some problems with non-rectangular windows.

Seamless mode works better with a Windows host OS but it still works adequately on a Linux host OS.

A recent feature added to VirtualBox displays a small mini toolbar for each VM at the top or bottom of the host OS desktop. That allows access to features such as mounting discs or sharing folders.

I use seamless mode to do Windows XP software development in an XP virtual machine running on top of Windows Vista. I'm considering using Linux as my host OS instead of Vista.

You can easily get into and out of Seamless mode by pressing the host key at the same time as "L". The host key is usually the right-hand "Ctrl" key.

After my reinstallation, to be sure there's nothing VirtualBox related on the machine, kernel modules and udev rules included, and after a week or so, I didn't experience screen corruption.

The other difference is that I didn't install the qt3 compatibility library.

Just to add some other elements, I had (or still have) the problem without the composite/desktop effects.

VirtualBox 3.0.6 OSE just came out today. I upgraded to 3.0.6 from 3.0.4 and this screen corruption went away. Before whenever I just opened the main interface the screen corruption affected most Qt apps. Now with 3.0.6 I can't reproduce it anymore. I haven't fully tested it but it looks good so far.

I was about to write another post confirming that without VB I was not seeing the problem, but this news is much better :-D

I'm still seeing the problem with VirtualBox 3.0.6. It doesn't always happen but sometimes I get the strange colors and negative-like screen display. I also can't seem to get VirtualBox windows to work properly with desktop effects enabled. They either turn into hazy rectangles or I get a bar with part of the guest desktop near the bottom of the display. VirtualBox seems to work in XFCE as far as the display goes.

I ran into a few new problems with VirtualBox 3.0.6. The virtual machines sometimes hang on shutdown in Windows or Linux hosts. Also on Linux changes made to the virtual disk are lost after a reboot.

I gave up on VirtualBox for Linux. So far it's been an ongoing battle and VirtualBox only seems to mostly work on Windows. There are problems in Windows as well.

Slackware 13 isn't the cause of the VirtualBox bugs. Every version of VirtualBox trades one set of bugs for a new set. It's like KDE and keeps getting new features but apparently not bug fixes.

Hi, I had the same problem with VirtualBox 3.0.5.
I found that this problem started when I changed the DefaultDepth from 16 to 24 in my xorg.conf.
When I changed it back to DefaultDepth 16 again the corruption with the windows stopped.

I haven't tried VirtualBox 3.0.6 yet using 24 bit depth, I'll try it today and see.

Regards,

Yeah, forget my previous post about 3.0.6 correcting the screen corruption. It seemed to work for the first couple of days but now the issue seems to have risen its ugly head again. I noticed that my screen size within the VBox VM had shrunk one day after I had installed VBox Guest Additions. I resized the window to what I had before and that seemed to start the screen corruption issue. This is the only bug that is keeping me from truly enjoying Slackware 13.0.

I was going to try setting the depth to 16 but discovered that the ATI "fglrx" driver for my display doesn't support a depth of 16. I'll see if I can try it on some of my other machines later.

I tried 16-bit depth with an nVidia driver and have the same problems. Anything except "seamless" mode does not display virtual machine windows properly. Full screen mode also doesn't work. The depth setting doesn't seem to have any effect on the problem.

The good new is that VirtualBox works fine with XFCE.