Headless VirtualBox
I’m currently laying out a DSP/FPGA board to interface to the MUSAMP board below for real-time signal processing. I’m laying out the schematics and PCB layout using gEDA (GPL Electronic Design Automation) tools. I originally started working on gEDA through a SuSE VirtualBox virtual machine on a Mac OSX host.
The Mac OSX host is on a Macbook Pro, which is naturally somewhat limited in resources compared to desktops. In addition, I tend to have my spec sheets open through spaces. Zooming in and out in gschem and flipping between spec sheets wasn’t as responsive as I hoped.
After some trouble migrating the VirtualBox ‘Appliance’ to my Windows 7 desktop (required an NTFS partition), I started using ‘Headless’ mode in VirtualBox. ‘Headless’ starts the virtual machine in the background, which can then be accessed using Windows’ RDP protocol (the standard windows remote desktop software).
A few things of note, Windows 7 uses port 3389 for remote desktop, which is the same as the default port in VirtualBox. Change the port, and make sure your firewall lets the chosen port (in TCP) through.
Execute in command prompt
%VirtualBox Installation%/VBoxHeadless –startvm “VirtualMachineNameHere” –vrdp=config
Choose a remote desktop client for your remote computer (TSclientX is the only Mac OSX client that worked with VirtualBox, CoRD worked only for getting to Windows 7).
If it works, make a shortcut to the above command with cmd.exe as a prefix.
EDIT #1: make sure to install VBoxGuestAdditions. You can then change the resolution from your RDP client by
$ sudo /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-3.x.x/bin/VBoxControl guestproperty set /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Vbgl/Video/SavedMode 848x480x32
