VirtualBox Guests Keyboard Capture

Support Virtualization
1

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing a strange and annoying issue when running VirtualBox guests on Manjaro. When using key combinations like Alt+Tab, Alt+F4 etc., those are interpreted by both KDE Plasma and the currently running VM.

For example, when running a Windows guest and pressing Win+E, both Windows’ Explorer and KDE Plasma’s Dolphin are launched. When pressing Alt+F4, both Virtualbox’s dialog for shutting down the VM and Windows’ shutdown dialog appears.

Now there is an option in VirtualBox’s settings which is directly related to this:
Input → Extended Features: Auto Capture Keyboard
When enabled, behavior is like mentioned above. When disabled, only KDE Plasma receives the key combination and the guest does not react at all.

I’m not sure when this behavior started, but I know that it was different in the past. Does anyone have any ideas how this might be fixed?

System Information:
Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.6.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.10.13-3-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: AMD Ryzen
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA
Virtualbox: 7.1.2

2

I see a few vague reports of the keyboard capture not working a few months ago (results of a quick Internet search) but nothing conclusive.

  • Does this behaviour still exist after switching to Wayland?
  • Does it still exist in a newly created User account?

Please provide some more useful system information:

inxi --admin --verbosity=8 --filter --no-host --width
3

Trying to start a Wayland session results in a black screen with just the mouse cursor being visible (see this topic).

Yes, the issue persists. Also tried different VMs and even set one up from scratch just to be sure. Same result.

4

Fixed the Wayland session issue and indeed, keyboard capturing seems to work as intended when running VirtualBox on Wayland.

1 Like
5

Thankfully, this issue got fixed on X11 after applying the 2024-11-30 stable update.

6

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