Ubuntu guest terminal loses keyboard input in gnome terminal

[yurivict]

Keyboard input loss is the first symptom. This happens after a while after some activity in guest and multiple switches between guest in full screen and host OS (Mac OS).

Once keyboard input is lost, other programs still seem to have input, but not the new (restarted) terminal window. The attempt to legitimately shut the system down leads to guest hang.

I am not sure if this is predictably reproducible but this happened to me many times overt and over again.

[Michael Thayer]

This sounds to me more like a bug in the Ubuntu guest system. The reason I think this is that VirtualBox sends keystrokes to the guest system as a whole, and is not aware of the individual applications running in the guest. It is the guest system (Ubuntu in this case) that is in charge of distributing the keystrokes correctly to the applications.

If you want to take a closer look at what keyboard events are going to a guest application, you can use the "xev" application to monitor them. You will need to specify the ID of the window you wish to monitor, which you can find out using the "xwininfo" tool.

[yurivict]

I also observe this in FreeBSD host with vbox-4.0.51.

Why this doesn't happen on free running Ubuntu and happens when it runs under VirtualBox? They both send events to the OS as a whole and not to individual apps.

[Michael Thayer]

Have I understood you correctly then? You install an Ubuntu guest (or did you use a copy of your original guest on your FreeBSD system?) and you install Guest Additions. You start the guest, switch to full screen, then switch several times, without exiting fullscreen, from VirtualBox to other host applications and back again (doing other things in the guest in-between?). After a certain number of switches, you can't predict how many, GNOME terminal in the guest stops responding to keyboard input but other applications in the guest continue to work as usual, and when you try to shut the guest down it hangs?

Can you get input into other GNOME terminal windows in the guest, or ssh into the guest (e.g. by installing openssh-server and setting up port forwarding from host to guest)? If so, can you try out what I said with xev (if you do it from the ssh session you will need to set "DISPLAY=:0.0), and see if the guest is still responsive via ssh when you get the shutdown hang?