"headed" virtualbox + vnc

[Bernhard Froehlich]

On 02.12.2011 00:14, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 01/12/2011 22:02 Martin Simmons said the following:
>>>>>>> On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:11:55 +0200, Andriy Gapon said:
>>>
>>> Is it possible to start a guess VM with GUI and also be able to 
>>> access it via VNC?
>>> All google hits for freebsd+virtualbox+vnc are about VBoxHeadless.
>>
>> Probably not simultaneously, but you can close the GUI with the 
>> "Save the
>> machine state" option and then bring it back to life as a headless 
>> VM
>> (presumably with vnc).
>>
>> Use VBoxManage controlvm ... savestate to stop the headless VM and 
>> then start
>> it again in GUI mode.
>
> The reason I am asking is that apparently that feature is available 
> with RDP
> (via Devices -> Enable Remote Display).  So I hoped for the same with 
> VNC.

The correct answer is not yet. Currently VNC support is a hack and does 
not
integrate very well. Since VirtualBox 4.0 there is a new plugin API 
which allows
to write a VNC plugin that integrates the same way as RDP but without 
the GPL
licensing issues. Someone already started writing such a VNC plugin but 
that
work has stalled. It's more or less in a working state so they plan to 
integrate
it at some point in the future.

We have an highly experimental port of that code available for vbox 
4.0.4 but I
don't know if we ever got it working. bapt@ has done some work on this 
so probably
he knows something about it.

http://redports.org/browser/virtualbox/emulators/virtualbox-extpack-vnc
http://redports.org/~virtualbox/svn.tar.bz2

-- 
Bernhard Froehlich
http://www.bluelife.at/