Virtualbox Archives - Beshoy Girgis

Virtualbox | Ubuntu | Chrome – Rendering Issue

Beshoy Girgis — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:37:46 +0000

I’ve been having crazy problems with Chrome hanging on my Virtualbox build. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Chrome was causing Ubuntu’s rendering to crash. All of a sudden when visiting a random site such as https://chrome.google.com/webstore, the virtual machine would turn all black or all white or rendering would be all sorts of crazy where I can’t click on anything ( objects are there, I can move windows around and what not, but they wouldn’t render as they really are ). I am at that point forced to hit alt+f2 and sudo poweroff as a sudo reboot would sometimes bring Ubuntu back up with the same rendering issues.

After much digging, I came across http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1974800 with a suggestion of starting Chrome with the following command:

google-chrome --blacklist-accelerated-compositing

I’ve come to find out that this may have resolved my rending issue! It seems to be more related to Virtualbox and how it’s handling 3D acceleration.

To update the desktop/launcher icons you can run:

locate google-chrome.desktop

Which will probably give you the following:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.desktop
/usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Really, the only one you need to edit is the one in your /usr/share/applications/. You can also copy that file to ~/.local/share/applications/ and add

--blacklist-accelerated-compositing to the end of any "Exec=" line ( should be three -- one for first opening Chrome, one

Linux ( Gnome/Unity/KDE ) + Virtualbox + Mouse issues

Beshoy Girgis — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:52:07 +0000

After the latest Ubuntu upgrade my mouse became extremely unstable. I use Gnome 3 and at random times, my mouse’s X and Y values would jump to 0. This made it difficult to complete simple tasks as well as the annoyance of Gnome’s hot window from the top left corner being triggered constantly just by moving the mouse anywhere in the screen. A bit of research led me to an Arch Linux thread where others were experiencing the same issue. The solution turned out to be simple!:

xinput set-prop "VirtualBox mouse integration" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0.5 0 0 0 0.5 0 0 0 1.0
xinput set-prop "VirtualBox mouse integration" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 1.0 0 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 1.0

More information can be found at the thread where I found the result, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1150418#p1150418

Ubuntu + Virtualbox: Numeric Keypad

Beshoy Girgis — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:47:52 +0000

The numeric keypad doesn’t work in a fresh Ubuntu install in Virtualbox ( possibly not related to Virtualbox but is one of the factors in my case )…

A bunch of Googling leads to two solutions that when put together, worked for me:

{Name} ( top right of screen ) -> System Settings -> Keyboard Layout -> Layouts Tab -> Options -> Numeric Keypad Layout Selection -> Select “Legacy”

This alone didn’t do the trick. The next piece I found was to hit ctrl + shift + Num Luck. You may have to hit that combo then type some numbers, try it again, type some numbers, etc etc. Those two things together did the trick for me and now.. I can use the Keypad!