VirtualBox Toolbar is hidden! How to show it?

Solution 1:

To re-enable the Toolbar right-click on the bottom line, then select and tick the Show Toolbar entry on the pop-up menu:

Do not disable both, the toolbar, and the statusbar.

When running Unity desktop the only way to restore them is to manually edit the VirtualBox.xml file located in ~/.config/VirtualBox or ~/.VirtualBox.

Search for the following lines

 <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Statusbar" value="false"/>
 <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Toolbar" value="false"/>

to replace "false" with "true".

Please make a backup of this file before you edit it, as all informations on your VMs are stored there as well. No instance of Virtual Box or VirtualBoxManager must run on editing this file because it will be overwritten otherwise.

Solution 2:

I understand your frustration. It's very user unfriendly that you can remove the toolbar by right clicking it, and are seemingly supposed to right-click it again to view it, which isn't possible because it's invisible. :)

You can right-click the status bar and show the toolbar from there. If you've chosen to hide both the statusbar and the toolbar, then it's kinda difficult in Ubuntu, using Unity and Global Menus. If you're using som other desktop than Unity or you're using Unity and have deactivated Global Menus, then you can right-click the menubar to get the same options as you get on the toolbar and statusbar.

If you want to fix it manually, then you can open ~/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml in GEdit or something. Then locate VirtualBox/Global/Extradata and add <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Toolbar" value="true" />. That should work, although you might possibly have to restart VirtualBox.