4 Guest Additions 4.5 Seamless windows With the “seamless windows” feature of VirtualBox, you can have the windows that are displayed within a virtual machine appear side by side next to the windows of your host. This feature is supported for the following guest operating systems (provided that the Guest Additions are installed): Windows guests (support added with VirtualBox 1.5) Supported Linux or Solaris guests running the X Window System (added with VirtualBox 1.6). After seamless windows are enabled (see below), VirtualBox suppresses the display of the Desktop background of your guest, allowing you to run the windows of your guest operating system seamlessly next to the windows of your host: To enable seamless mode, after starting the virtual machine, press the Host key (normally the right control key) together with “L”. This will enlarge the size of the VM’s display to the size of your host screen and mask out the guest operating system’s background. To go back to the “normal” VM display (i.e. to disable seamless windows), press the Host key and “L” again. 4.6 Guest properties Starting with version 2.1, VirtualBox allows for requesting certain properties from a running guest, provided that the VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed and the VM is running. This is good for two things: 1. A number of predefined VM characteristics are automatically maintained by VirtualBox and can be retrieved on the host, e.g. to monitor VM performance and statistics. 2. In addition, arbitrary string data can be exchanged between guest and host. This works in both directions. 66
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