Unable to hide second screen

[rschoon]

In the latest version of VirtualBox (4.3.22), it seems that it is no longer to turn the second screen off from within the guest. In 4.3.20 and earlier it was possible to use xrandr (or the guest OS's display settings) to disable it.

Primarily I used two scripts, one to turn it off:

    xrandr --output VBOX-1 --off

and another to turn it back on:

    xrandr --output VBOX1 --auto 
    xrandr --output VBOX1 --right-of VBOX0

The name of the screens did change to VGA0/VGA1, but after fixing the names in the scripts, it only blanks that screen out (until the screen is interacted with)

This started occurring after updating the virtual machine to use the latest guest additions, and it works again after downgrading the guest additions back to the previous version.

[rschoon]

vbox.log

[rschoon]

In case it isn't obvious, the intent is to be able to add/remove the second monitor without restarting the virtual machine.

[michael]

I'm afraid this was a casualty of the fix to ticket #13287. For now I am not sure how best to handle this, as I don't really like monitors disappearing when they get power management events. The next major release should have an option to disable additional monitors at run-time from the host.

[rschoon]

Cool, that would work fine for my purposes.

[michael]

Actually I forgot: this is not implemented in the graphical interface in 4.3, but it is available via the command line:

VBoxManage controlvm [...] setvideomodehint [...] enabled:no

4.3.22 has a bug in the Linux/Solaris Additions which sometimes prevents the screen from disappearing. I hope that this will be fixed in future releases.

[frank]

The fix is part of the VBox 4.3.24 release. Please don't forget to update the Guest Additions to 4.3.24.

[michael]

Bear in mind that this will usually work as described in comment:4 even with 4.3.22.