VirtualBox – How to Send CTRL-ALT-Fn to Virtual Box Guest Linux

When I try to enable 2d video acceleration I get this warning:

On the Display page, you have 2D Video Acceleration enabled. As 2D Video Acceleration is supported for Windows guests only, this feature will be disabled.

So it seems 2d acceleration is not available if you run virtual Linux machines.

The proper solution: get a VNC client that can send those keys. Like jsbillings says, some clients give you the option of sending keys to the remote via a menu. With the standard xvnc4viewer, you can use the -MenuKey option to set the key that activates the menu. Again, as per jsbillings' answer, the default key is F8.

The hack: if you have a shell running on the remote server, try chvt 3 (or sudo chvt 3). On the console, you don't need Ctrl+Alt+F#, you can use Alt+F# (or Alt+→ repeatedly) to go back to the X server's TTY. Or just log in and say sudo chvt 7; logout (or whatever the X VT is).

The stupid kludge: since Ctrl+Alt+F# is captured early by the X server, the direct (and hard) way is to disable (temporarily or permanently) these keys. This requires you to modify your X configuration and is an annoying thing to do, and probably a bad idea besides. Go with one of the others. :)