Gnome 3 display problems, VB 4.0.10 under Mac OS 10.5.8

[Tom Wyant]

The following was aired in the forum (​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42670) and perryg recommended I report this as a regression. This may be a Guest Additions problem, but I have not made that assumption in assigning the component in which the problem appears.

Using VirtualBox 4.0.8 running under Mac OS 10.5.8 Leopard, I was able to run Ubuntu 11.04 Unity. Fedora 15 only worked in classic. But when I upgraded to VB 4.0.10, neither Ubuntu 11.04 nor Fedora 15 worked. I was able to restore functionality by removing the 4.0.10 Guest Additions, running the 4.0.10 uninstaller, and then re-installing 4.0.8.

Fedora 15 with Guest Additions 4.0.10 looked fine until I logged in in classic mode. Once I did that, it just displayed large white rectangles. Sometimes the whole virtual display large. When it wasn't the whole display, the Fedora default wallpaper was behind the white rectangles. At least, that's what I remember -- there was considerable thrashing around with this issue, as you can imagine.

Ubuntu 11.04 with Guest Additions 4.0.10 also looked fine until I logged in. Once I did that under Unity, it displayed the default wallpaper. Occasionally my own wallpaper and some of the windows would flicker into view, with the dock (or whatever they call it) on the left and the menu at the top as just gray rectangles. This flickering-in-and-out did not seem to correlate to anything I was doing with the VM - it happened even when the VM did not have focus. When the default wallpaper was on display, I could see my own wallpaper and windows (complete with gray blobs) displayed very small in the lower left-hand corner of the virtual display. In this context, "very small" means about the size of the image displayed in the OS X dock icon.

Now, 10.5.8 Leopard is a release behind -- about to be two when Lion comes out. Does Oracle not support the combination of Gnome 3 on VirtualBox under Mac OS 10.5? Or do the symptoms suggest something I might have done wrong? Or is my explanation completely unclear?

Oh - Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.04 work for me without problems under both 4.0.8 and 4.0.10. Both Fedora 14 and Fedora 15 were clean installs. The Ubuntu 11.04 is an upgrade from the 10.04 (via 10.10). Both Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 had 3D acceleration turned on in the VB control panel. The Ubuntu 11.04 had 32 meg of video memory assigned in the VB control panel, the Fedora 15 had 128 meg, per recommendations in the fora (forums?) of the respective operating systems. The hardware is a mid-2007 20-inch iMac, 2GHz, 2Gb memory, and is actually about 4.5 years old.