▷ How to put full screen in virtualbox and rescale desktop

Perhaps many users have doubts about how to put full screen in VirtualBox. It is easy to enlarge the window, but there are some tricks to place it completely on our desktop, without seeing borders of your window. And much more important, knowing how we can configure the automatic full resolution of our virtual machine without seeing only a white background frame. We will see all this in this little tutorial.

Index of contents

VirtualBox is undoubtedly the most widely used Hypervisor for users who want to bet on free software and who do not want to pay a license like in VMware to be able to create and power more than one virtual machine at the same time. Of course there are other options like Hyper-V from Microsoft that performs virtualization by Hardware. Or VMware ESXi, which is an entire operating system directly installed on our computer to be able to virtualize any operating system for free from hardware.

Although it seems silly, being able to put full screen in VirtualBox or any other Hypervisor is something that we should know and we don't always know how to do it correctly. As well as adjusting the resolution of this screen to see it at full size or in the space available in the window, as if we were in the physical operating system.

Full screen in VirtualBox with "Host + F"

The first way we have to do this is through a combination of hotkeys that we can use to activate and deactivate the full screen.

The "host" key in VirtualBox is by default the " Right Crtl " key on our keyboard, don't get confused with the other Ctrl key. So, to activate the full screen, all we have to do is press the key combination " Ctrl Right + F " while on our virtual machine. This window will immediately appear:

In which we are basically shown that we are going to enter the full screen and that we can return to the normal state by pressing this key combination again. In this way we will have been able to enter full screen mode. So to deactivate the full screen, we will press "Ctrl Right + F" again.

If the screen is not filled with the full desktop of the virtual machine, don't worry because now we will fix this too.

Full screen in VirtualBox with the virtual machine menu

If we do not want to use the shortcut keys, in the tools menu of our virtual machine we will also have an option to do this.

So let's go to the " View " tab, and click on the " Full screen mode " option.

To return to the normal state, we can place the mouse in the lower area to display the options menu, click again on " View -> Full screen mode ", and it will return to the original state.

Right at the far right of this options menu, we have a button that will allow us to directly return to the normal state.

Automatically put full screen resolution with Guest Additions

Before we have seen that when putting full screen in VirtualBox the resolution of the virtual operating system remains the same and does not take advantage of the entire diagonal of the screen. But we have a way to change this and have the system fully adapt its resolution to the window size.

To do this, we will have to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. If you don't know, the process is very simple.

We go to the tools menu of the virtual machine and click on " Devices " and choose the option " Insert CD image of the < > ”.

Immediately a notification will appear in our system that a CD has been inserted. Like any other, we will click to open it, or we will go to “ This team ” and click on “ VirtualBox Guest Additions CD Drive ”.

We double click to start the installation process. In it we will only have to click on " next " a few times and then " install ".

Then we restart the virtual machine and they will be installed. Let's try now to put full screen in VirtualBox, or simply to manually rescale the window, we will see that the resolution is automatically modified to occupy all the available space.

Well these are the ways to put full screen, or to rescale our window and that your resolution of the virtual machine adapts to the space available with VirtualBox.

If you want to know more interesting and necessary VirtualBox configurations, visit these tutorials:

We hope this little article has solved your doubts about putting your virtual machine in full screen. You can ask us more questions about it in the comment box.