VirtualBox and Xorg

[Ben Paley]

Hello all,

I’ve installed 9.2-RELEASE in VirtualBox on a Macbook. It was, against my expectations, pretty much the easiest install I’ve ever done, but I’ve had trouble with Xorg.

I followed the instructions at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/virtualization-guest.html#virtualization-guest-virtualbox-guest-additions - I’ve installed emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions successfully (as far as I can tell, anyway; VB now lets me configure a shared directory, even though I don’t seem to be able to mount it because FreeBSD doesn’t support the file system). I’ve added the vboxguest and vboxservice lines to rc.conf, and I’ve created /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/90-vboxguest.fdi with permissions 644 owned by root:wheel.

If I do startx with no configuration then I get a nice vanilla X but the cursor doesn’t respond.

If I do "Xorg -configure” then the Device section in xorg.conf.new is just like the one in the docs. The InputDevice is a little different:

Section “InputDevice”
	Identifier	“Mouse0”
	Driver	“vboxmouse”
	Option	“Protocol” “auto”
	Option	“Device” “/dev/sysmouse”
	Option	“ZAxisMapping” “4 5 6 7”
EndSection

…but commenting out the extra lines doesn’t seem to change anything: if I do “X -config /root/xorg.conf.new” then the screen goes black and I’m not sure what’s happening. The cursor gets captured and released by VirtualBox just as it should, but while it’s captured it becomes black or invisible or ceases to exist, or something. In any case I don’t think it moves, because when I release it, it shows up in the same place even if I’ve been wiggling my finger around.

I have a feeling that the vboxmouse and vboxvideo aren’t present, or are improperly detected or something. Am I supposed to install them separately? Or is there anything else obvious? Or non-obvious?

I’m not sure whether or not the system is using HAL - hal-0.5.14_20 is installed, but I don’t really know if I need the HAL policy file: but it doesn’t seem to make any difference if I move it.

Thanks very much in advance,
Ben