[vbox-dev] Loss of GUI when screen saver kicks in

[Perry Halbert]

Fedora 16 does the same thing.  I just used wheezy as a reference, sorry.
But I think I have the common part between them.  Gnome3.
KDE does not do this in my tests.

By the way, I never use the distros GAs.  I remove them and install my 
own, or the ones from VBox.




On 06/06/2012 08:40 AM, Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> Hi Perry,
>
> On 04.06.2012 22:58, Perry Halbert wrote:
>> Latest SVN
>>
>> Start a debian wheezy guest and wait for the screen saver to kick in
>> (blank screen) You can set it to 1 minute to test with.
>>
>> Once it does the entire GUI disappears from the host. Still shows
>> running in the Main Manager and show running says it is active. Only way
>> to get it back is to send acpi shutdown which doesn't really work by the
>> way to shut down the guest.
>>
>> DT manager in wheezy is gnome3 and in the GUI there is no way to
>> actually turn off the screen saver (which I find stupid).
>>
>> I worked around this by creating a script in /etc/X11/Xsession.d
>> with the following "xset -dpms s off" sans quotes. Now the screen blank
>> does not kill the GUI.
>>
>> Figured you would want to know :)
> Confirmed. You forgot to mention that wheezy is in alpha1 stage...
>
> wheezy comes with guest additions version 4.1.14, which supports
> disabling screens. Apparently all screens can be disabled, and this
> means the GUI becomes invisible. With the evil side effect of losing the
> normal source of input, too.
>
> VBoxManage controlvm<VMNAME>  keyboardputscancode 01 81
> brings it back (by signalling an "Esc" key press and release).
>
> Of course this needs a better solution. At least one window needs to
> remain, to retain the input source. A bit of GUI hacking is necessary to
> achieve this.
>
> VBoxManage controlvm<VMNAME>  acpipowerbutton
> also brings it back as a side effect, but only because the guest OS
> doesn't actually shut down because the ACPI config doesn't seem to be
> usable. Something is VERY wrong with acpi handling on wheezy (/proc/acpi
> is essentially empty), and I couldn't find a way to configure anything.
> To me this looks like something the Debian folks need to fix.
>
> Klaus
>
>
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