Saturday, July 28, 2012

Windows 8 Full Screen in VirtualBox on Linux

 

Windows 8 does not support the VirtualBox display driver and the most current release of VirtualBox has a generic driver that supports some canned 1600x9 and 4x3 drivers but they were wrong for my laptop and not having full screen on Windows 8 make life hard for the charms and start menu etc. So to fix this follow these steps

Power off the the Windows 8 virtual machine.

Goto the VirtualBox console and right click ‘show in File Manager’. Note the name W8RP in my case, you need quotes if you had a space in the name.

vbox name

Open a shell and go to the folder shown.

vbox location

 

Find the resolution you want VirtualBox via the Linux settings menu, in my case 1600x900:

Screen rosolution

In the shell open from above enter the command:

vboxmanage setextradata W8RP CustomVideoMode1 1600x900x32

 

Start the VM, and you can select the custom resolution shown below.

Screen resolution available

Lovely.

 

Hat tip for the Windows version: http://www.mstechpages.com/2011/09/17/set-custom-resolution-in-virtualbox-for-windows-8/

 

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