"headed" virtualbox + vnc

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 1 Dec 2011, Greg Byshenk wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 07:02:24PM +0200, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>> on 01/12/2011 18:17 Warren Block said the following:
>>> On Thu, 1 Dec 2011, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>
>>>> Is it possible to start a guess VM with GUI and also be able to access it via VNC?
>>>> All google hits for freebsd+virtualbox+vnc are about VBoxHeadless.
>>>
>>> net/x11vnc installed in the guest should work.
>>
>> Of course that's not what I meant/wanted.
>
> It's about as close as you can get, I think.
>
> If I understand aright, "standard" VNC uses its own display, which
> means that it can't somehow "attach" to an existing X display.
>
> I've never used it, but according to its description, x11vnc -does-
> allow you to connect to a running X display:
>
> 	"x11vnc differs from traditional UNIX VNC servers in that
> 	it is accessing a real X displays that may already be in
> 	progress rather than creating its own X server for clients
> 	to connect to."

Yes, I've used it and it works pretty well.  Another option is to always 
run the VM guest headless and use a VNC client on the host to connect to 
it "locally".  That works too, and is similar to using the direct 
VirtualBox window.