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I'm running Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS on VirtualBox 6.1.16, my host is Windows 10 Insider Preview.

I'm trying to get full screen without a desktop environment. I want to run a minimalist build with dwm as my window manager and st as my terminal emulator.

I tried installing the virtualbox-guest-x11 package. It automatically installs a bunch of recommended packages, including a basic Gnome environment. After reboot, it presents me the GDM login screen. If I login to another tty, install and run startx, the X server can't go full screen, while the Gnome X server (which I don't want) can. I can run dwm and st in the X server I started with startx, but it won't go full screen like the Gnome one.

I tried following the VirtualBox documentation and install the guest additions mounting the CD and running VBoxLinuxAdditions.run. The result is the same.

These screenshots are from the same VM: enter image description here tty1 with the Gnome environment installed automatically by virtualbox-guest-x11. enter image description here tty2 when I do a startx with dwm and st installed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

th3_z3r0
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1 Answers1

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I think I figured it out.

Both the VirtualBox Guest Additions and Xorg were installed correctly, hence my confusion. However, this was not enough to get a working full screen. VirtualBox Guest Additions installs a program called VBoxClient, typically located at /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-<version number>/bin. If you run that program with the argument --vmsvga, you get full screen. Perhaps GNOME automatically searches for this program and runs it if it's installed, but since I wanted a minimal install without any desktop environment, I had to do it manually. You can also run VBoxClient with the arguments --clipboard and --draganddropg, for shared clipboard and drag and drop functionality, it only accepts one argument per call, though. Alternatively, you can run VBoxClient-all, it's the same command, but it enables everything at once.

It needs to run after the X server is started, so I prepended a single line, VBoxClient-all &, in my ~/.xinitrc file, and now I have full screen whenever I start X.

th3_z3r0
  • 31