I use Sun's VirtualBox hosted on my Mac Pro which has four monitors.

I run my trading software on a Windows XP VM and definitely need it to span monitors to view all the charts.

The following is all in the VirtualBox documentation but I thought I would summarize it all on one place

  • The client must be WindowsXP
  • The client must be started in the "headless" mode
  • Access to the client is via RDC

Starting the client in headless mode.

I start the client from the command line. The name of the client is case sensitive. You should see something like the following:

view plain print about
1BigMac:cryptogram_production don$ VBoxHeadless -startvm xp_trading
2VirtualBox Headless Interface 3.0.6
3(C) 2008-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4All rights reserved.
5
6
7Listening on port 3389

Configuring XP

You must configure XP to use multiple screens. Set the screen resolution to the native resolution of your monitor and orient them however you want. In my case I am only going to allocate three monitors.

Configuring RDC

You need one RDC connection for each screen on the client. Be sure to save each with a unique name.

You control which monitor to send the output to on the login tab:

Notice the @1 in the domain name. This tells RDC to send it to the first XP screen. This IS NOT necessarily the first Host screen. More on this below

You control the display size on the Display tab

Notice the two arrows. One tells RDC to use fullscreen mode and the other tells us which host monitor to use. In this case the first XP screen corresponds the the second(ary) host(Mac) screen.

Continue with the other RDC connections, changing the domain to @2 and @3 etc and the host display to Tertiary and Fourth Display. (I guesss they couldn't figure out a fancy way to say "fourth"

Running the configuration.

  • Start the vm using VBoxHeadless as above
  • Open the three(in my case) RDC connections.

    I do this by navigating to the connections in Finder, selecting them all, right click and choose open. You can also open them with File->Open a Saved Connection

Usage Notes

  • You can drag your host windows onto the clients monitor and they will still be available. If you give focus to the client window it will, of course, hide the Mac windows on that monitor
  • I notice that sometimes have to click once to give the client screen focus and then again to give a window in that screen focus.

Screenshot of my setup

Notice that I have a Mac app (Tweetie) on top of one of the Windows screens.

For the full size image Click here

This entry was posted on September 14, 2009 at 3:29 PM and has received 5078 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.