[SOLVED] CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

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gbohn
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[SOLVED] CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by gbohn » 2012/02/20 21:06:11

Hi;

I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to toggle out of a full-screen session of a Virtual machine launched with the Virtual Machine manager (back to the Windowed Console)... I know can leave full-screen mode by shutting down the Guest. But, I'm assuming that there's a way to toggle back and forth between full-screen and the console window.

I set up a CentOS 6.2 64-Bit system, and then created a Windows -7 (64-Bit) guest Virtual machine using the 'Virtual Machine Manager' GUI. I left the default display type as 'VNC'. I believe I am using the KVM feature of qemu-kvm in case that's relevant.

At any rate I can start the Virtual machine in the 'Virtual Manager Console' (starting at the 'Virtual Machine Manager' panel). I see the Virtual machine running in the console window, and can use the panel to switch between the 'Console' and 'Details' view without a problem.

Clicking on the consoles 'full-screen' icon switches the display to a full-screen, but now I don't know how to get back to the Windowed view.

Is this a one-way switch, or should I be able to switch back to a windowed view? If I can switch back (or otherwise bring up the Console controls) what is the technique?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks;

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toracat
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[SOLVED] CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Mac

Post by toracat » 2012/02/20 23:22:17

Hmmm, it's [i]supposed[/i] to be ctrl-alt-f, but I just tried it and it did not work. The only way I've found so far to get out of the full-screen guest is ctrl-alt-Esc. It looks as if the full-screen mode is a one-way ticket. :-x

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Re: CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by r_hartman » 2012/02/21 09:12:03

When in full screen mode, hit Ctrl-Alt to 'unhinge' the mouse and move the mouse to the top-middle of the screen. A little applet drops down to allow you to leave full screen and send key-combinations.

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toracat
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Re: CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by toracat » 2012/02/21 09:19:36

Indeed. That works. :-)

gbohn
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Re: CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by gbohn » 2012/02/21 15:34:41

> A little applet drops down to allow you to leave full screen and send key-combinations....

Thanks, that helps a lot. I kept trying to find a reference document ) somewhere (using google), but seemed to find everything but what I needed. I had tried various keystrokes, but to no avail.

As it turns out, things were more difficult for me because I was actually running CentOS in a VMware Workstation Virtual machine in full-screen mode. So, the VMware drop-down menu displays as a sliver across the top of the screen (about two thirds of the width). When you bring your mouse up to the top of the screen 'sliver', this causes the VMware toolbar to drop down to display Controls for this guest.

So, the VMware 'Outer Hosts' toolbar 'sliver' was hiding the even thinner sliver showing where to hover the mouse for the qemu/kvm/libvirt/virtual manager/gtk-vnc/'whatever it is' nested guest's full-screen window toolbar. (I'll try to attach a picture in a future edit, if I can get one).

As it was, I ended up changing the default 'attention' keys for the VMware 'Outer Host' to be 'Ctl-Shift' from the default 'Ctrl-Alt' to try and avoid conflict with the 'Ctrl-Alt' that the 'Inner Host' was using. I then put the Outer Host's (VMware) full-screen session into 'Exclusive mode' so I could now see the thin line for the 'Inner Hosts' full-screen drop-down menu. (This removes the VMware menu from the screen, uncovering the thin line I need to see to find the right hover area).

At any rate, thanks and I hope this helps anyone else trying to do the same thing.

gbohn
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Re: CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by gbohn » 2012/02/21 18:27:08

>> (I'll try to attach a picture in a future edit, if I can get one).

In case anyone was actually interested, here's a picture with a series of screen-grabs, with each snippet showing only the top section of the display at that moment.

The top-most snippet shows the CentOS 'Outer Guest' desktop in full-screen mode of VMware workstation (under a Windows-7 host). The light blue sliver can be pulled down to get to the 'Outer-Hosts' VMware tools, as seen in the next snippet down.

The next snippet down shows the Win-7 'Inner Guest' in it's own full-screen mode (running under CentOS virtualization, which is in turn running under VMware workstation virtualization). The light blue Outer Hosts VMware toolbar is still visible.

Going down to the next snippet, I turned off the Outer-Hosts tool-bar by switching to its full-screen 'Exclusive Mode'. Now I can finally see the Inner Hosts (CentOS's) full-screen target area. The bottom-most snippet shows the CentOS toolbar now selected/active.

Thanks again.

| P.S.- For some reason I can't get it to accept an attached .jpg with the matching image... It shows some sort of browser error was encountered, but then goes away before I can read it.
| I'll update if I can ever figure out what's going wrong.... Some days computers seem like a bad idea :-)

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Re: [SOLVED] CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by r_hartman » 2012/02/22 09:29:40

Unfortunately, the forum's attachment feature is permanently broken. You'd need to use an external file host, like MegaUpload :-o

Thanks for reporting back, with all the VMWare details.
Do I understand correctly you have a Windows7 VMWare host, inside of which you have a CentOS guest running KVM, in which you have a Win-7 guest? Wow.

I changed the subject line to include [SOLVED], so one of the moderators can pick it up and change the status.

gbohn
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Re: [SOLVED] CentOS 6.2, How to exit Fullscreen from Virtual Machine?

Post by gbohn » 2012/02/22 18:23:18

> Do I understand correctly you have a Windows7 VMWare host, inside of which you have a CentOS guest running KVM, in which you have a Win-7 guest?

Yes, that's it exactly. And for the hat-trick, I used 'Remote Desktop Connection' to access the Outer-Host :-). Trying to keeps everything straight in that environment is interesting...

> You'd need to use an external file host...

Let's see if this works (or not...). The image at the link below is a series of 'snippets' showing the top section of the desktop display from five different times (each showing different conditions) with horizontal black bands separating each snippet. I made a few notes in red. You may need to click on the image itself for full resolution.

[url=http://i1048.photobucket.com/albums/s376/gbtestpage/5ac1319e.jpg]Image of Desktop at various points[/url]

This is the image which goes with the text description from my previous append (where I discovered I couldn't directly upload an image).

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