VirtualBox Host key

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS with the latest patches available.  I spun up a virtual machine in VirtualBox 4.3.10 and quickly became annoyed that common key combinations popped up messages, some of which offered to shutdown or reboot my guest OS.

I found the Preferences, Input, Virtual Machine, Host Key Combination setting pretty easily and changed it from the default Right Ctrl to Left Ctrl + Left Shift, considering it's far more rare for me to press two modifiers at the same time, other than Ctrl-Alt perhaps.

No soap.  The Right Ctrl stayed as the modifier!  I thought maybe I had to try turning it off and on again.  Maybe exit VirtualBox entirely?  Still nothing.  Every time, the preference would reset back to the default.

I even found the configuration file ~/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml on my system, though the new default is ~/.config/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml but it was not obvious what I might want to change the value to.

<ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Input/HostKeyCombination" value="65508"/>


Then I found a bug report!

Comment 1 had my answer:

1. Open VBox "Preferences..." / Input page / Virtual Machine tab.
2. Change the shortcut for "Host Key Combination" in embedded-editor of the shortcut table and (!) press Enter (or Return) key while this shortcut embedded-editor is opened. GUI applying shortcut changes only in that case as this is the default Qt behavior. If you simple press OK button instead your change will be discarded.

 Fix is part of VBox 4.3.14

Ubuntu changed my clock to UTC

I dual boot my computer between Ubuntu and Windows 7. After my upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS, I noticed that my clock was wrong in Windows. It was obvious that my hardware clock had been on EST and got switched to UTC during the upgrade. The worst part, I think, is that I even remember getting asked during the upgrade what time zone to set the hardware clock to. I guess the default changed, since my result was different.

I knew there had to be a way to fix it, and a quick search showed me the answer. Ubuntu hardware clock correction

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Beta 2 failure on VMWare

I saw a post from Ubuntu on Facebook that was asking for beta testers. I didn't officially sign up, but I did download http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/daily/20120417/precise-server-amd64.iso to test on a VMWare ESXi embedded cluster running 3.5.0 build 110271

The system booted from the ISO, and I proceeded through the keyboard selection and network settings. Then there was nothing. The system didn't lock up; pressing Alt-F2 got me to a working terminal.

The installation screen looked like this:

The log on Alt-F4 showed this:

I'll try again as well as search for other images to see if one works better than the one I downloaded.

Update: When I set up the VM, I didn't select the correct switch, so DHCP failed. During the install, I changed the switch and let it retry the network configuration. It succeeded then asked for the hostname. I just repeated those steps and have the same purple screen with no more activity. Having the correct network switch selected before network configuration allowed the install to complete normally. I call that a bug.