# Gentoo as a VirtualBox guest and full screen

## xavier10

Hello,

I am running Gentoo as a VirtualBox guest on a Mac laptop, and I have some issue with the full screen mode.

Basically, it worked fine, and I lost it after plugging the laptop to a video projector, which caused the resolution to go down, but now, the virtual machine will not go back to the full resolution again. I seem to be stuck at 640x480 no matter what I do.

Reinstalling guest additions did not solve anything.

I almost wonder whether I will have to scrape the virtual machine all together now.

Any idea ?

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## Jaglover

Is your Gentoo actually using vbox video driver?

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## xavier10

Yes, I am.

I did re-emerge several times virtualbox-guest-additions and xf86-video-virtualbox, and restarted the machine several times. Right now, it will go into full screen again, but I do not understand how it did so, as I just tried to re-re-emerge packages that did not allow it to go back to full screen the first time and did it the second time... I would really like to understand this issue, as I will use video-projectors again in the future, and do not want to go through the same pain again (the worst part for me is not to understand, and not to know what to do to fix it in a *deterministic* amount of time).

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## p1ng

xavier10,

I'm happy to hear you got the resolution back to normal.

The reason this happens is because when you plug the projector in, it automatically adjusts your laptops screen resolution settings to suit itself better. When you unplug your laptop, the screen resolution may stay the same, so you have to manually change the settings.

VirtualBox seems to have a lot of resolution issues and it can be difficult to change back to the resolution you want. Playing with the options in the "view" tab in the menu on top of your VM could help, but I assume you tried that.

Anyway, hopefully you understand why it happens now; sometimes the screen resolution will go back to normal (with desktop items in different places) or sometimes it wont change back automatically. Depends on the OS in use usually.

Regards,

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## xavier10

Indeed, the problem clearly comes from adjusting resolution, but my issue is that I fail to identify a deterministic procedure to get back to the normal situation. This does not sound very satisfactory to me...  :Smile: 

I would like to mention that it is not the first time I use a video projector, and I notice that plugging/unplugging the video in non fullscreen mode usually avoids the issue. The other day, I forgot to do that and the result was a lot of pain...

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