Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Making VirtualBox work in headless mode on Solaris

If you've ran VirtualBox 1.6.2 on Solaris or OpenSolaris (SXCE anyway) you'll see something interesting happen when you run VBoxHeadless (let's say in GNU screen) and kill X :-). It will die.

cthulhu% ./VBoxHeadless -s CentOS51
VirtualBox Headless Interface 1.6.2
(C) 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved

Listening on port 3389
X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

Which is kind of silly for something called "headless"...

Here's the fix:

env DISPLAY=buggerthis /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless -s SomeMachine

Now you can kill X happily.

It basically dies when :0.0 dies. Make it look for another DISPLAY, and it's fine.

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