While installing Solaris on VirtualBox on Linux host, I was slightly annoyed by the graphical interface. I had to go out of my screen session, use mouse, click the virtual machine window, let it steal the input and then press right ctrl key to go out, and use mouse again to go back to my screen session.

Solaris x86 supports installation over a serial port. Why not use it?

VirtualBox supports attaching a serial device to a guest machine. By default, serial ports are disabled. If you go to the details tab, and see ‘Serial Ports’, you can click it and get a dialog box. Enable serial port COM1 (IRQ 4 I/O port 0x3F8). There are two port modes. One of them is ‘Host Device’. It would be very nice to use it, but VirtualBox run as a normal user lacks permissions to create devices. The other option is ‘Host…