I have VirtualBox installed on two Slackware 13.0 systems. While VirtualBox is running if I open, say, a host terminal window it is "negative;" i.e., instead of black-on-white, it appears grayed-out, dark gray background. Any other host application does the same thing -- looks like a photographic negative. After exiting VirtualBox that condition persists until I shut down KDE (4.2.4) and restart it -- everything looks like a photographic negative. There is no problem whatsoever with the guest operations system.

This only happens on one system (the other is fine). The system has an ATI/AMD Radeon X300 series and is running the open source Radeon drivers (the proprietary drivers are not available for a 2.6.29.6-smp kernel as yet). Nothing in way of error messages shows up in any system logs. The processor is a Pentium 4, 3 GHz, there's 4 G of RAM and nothing exotic exists on the box that I'm aware of.

Have I messed some configuration setting or something; anybody else have this sort of thing; anybody know what to do about it?

Best wishes for the holidays.

If you run it with XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS set to 1, does it work properly?

Adam

Well, exported into the environment in .profile (I use KornShell, not BASH), log out, log back in, start VirtualBox (didn't start guest), open terminal window, photo negative. Also true of other applications (but not, strangely, Firefox).

Thanks.

Sorry, that was my one idea on the matter :-)

Adam

EDIT: Some how ended up double posting, and see no option to delete...

Thanks for taking the shot -- now I know more than I knew