Tag Archives: virtualbox

Windows 8 Developer Preview on VirtualBox

Posted by on September 21, 2011 Comments Off

Although I got a developer preview samsung Windows 8 tablet at the Microsoft Build event I do like to use Virtual machine whenever possible because they are very useful.

I have managed to get Windows 8 installed on VirtualBox on the Mac and PC. However the default size of the screen is rubish due to the lack of additions support, however you can get VirtualBox to include a custom video mode and this works. Todo this I used the command line:

VBoxManage setextradata "Windows 8" CustomVideoMode1 1366x768x32

Then start the VM and select the new resolution...

Next blog I will document some of the keyboard keystrokes I find useful for the Metro interface...

MacBook keyboard pains and VirtualBox/VMWare

Posted by on January 9, 2010 6 comments

As a MacBook user who has used Virtualisation on the mac for sometime now but only usually with Linux based OS, I was forced to use it with Windows recently and I quickly found out how badly it handles UK Macbook keyboards.

The default UK keyboard mapping on a MacBook are pretty much useless when using Virtual PC emulators such VirtualBox or VMWARE.

With this in mind, have produced a custom keyboard layout which maps all the keys to right place.

The only two exceptions are the two OPT keys, which I could only managed to map them to ALT-n keys, so the alternative mapping for these are:

€ aka left OPT 2 is mapped to right ALT 2

# aka left OPT 3 is mapped to right ALT 3

To use the customer keyboard mapping, download the .zip, unzip it.. and click on mbkbd\setup.exe and it will install the custom keyboard called “United Kindom – MacBook – Custom“.

And this me using it… boy did this make more productive!

This a screen shot me trying it out… :-)

(link fixed)