Currently the only way to have access to headless VirtualBox machine "display" in Gentoo is to use the proprietary version (which supports the RDP). Accidentally, the OSE version _does_ have a usable alternative, although it lacks some of the advanced features of the proprietary version. The OSE version has had the VNC support for some time (see http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/6020). A useful page which got me around how to compile-in the support for VNC was: http://www.netmusician.org/2010/06/compilevirtualboxose/ Unfortunately, the VNC option is _not_ made available through the configure script provided in the VirtualBox source code. I've created a small patch for VNC enabling and checking for the configure script and sent it upstream, but no reply has been made towards it so far. You can find the post here: http://vbox.innotek.de/pipermail/vbox-dev/2010-November/003390.html I've also made small changes to the ebuild for the VirtualBox in my local repository (see the attached patch), together with the configure script patch. The build has been so far tested only on my own machine (amd64, mostly stable). As an additional note, adding the VNC support to the OSE version of VirtualBox would pull in the libvncserver library as dependency.
Created attachment 256690 [details, diff] Add the --enable-vnc option to VirtualBox OSE configure script.
Created attachment 256692 [details, diff] Add the USE flag for enabling the VNC in VirtualBox OSE.
+ 08 Dec 2010; Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> + virtualbox-ose-3.2.12.ebuild, +files/virtualbox-ose-vnc.patch: + Added vnc functionality as requested in bugs #322325 and #348204. Thanks to + Malte Frerichs (request) and Branko Majic (request + patch). + Fixed without revbump. I had trouble getting keyboard input submitted to the VM (with the exception of enter, backspace and cursor keys all others didn't produce any input). So if this appears to be a common problem I will remove the whole vnc stuff again.
Whoops, forgot to mark this bug as fixed :)
