If you're at a meeting and want to save on battery, slightly dim the display and remove one of the 3 CPUs from the VBox configuration. You can get through a full day with some breaks with a single battery charge (5-6 hours). for shorts pauses, you will not have 'wake up breaks'. This conveniently happens after a while of inactivity in closed state, i.e. If you close your macbook, you will send the virtualbox to 'save the machine state' in the background, which is exactly what you will want to do on a laptop. Videos in fullscreen mode now will run smoothly in xubuntu. You would probably do this if you would like to work with a native OS X application. If you want to go back to native retina resolution, you can choose any of the modes from the 'System Preferences' > 'Display'. It will look blurred for a while, but after a while, you will no longer miss the Retina native resolution, if you work in Xubuntu.

You can save this as 'Application' and then add it to the dock.ĭo shell script'/Users/myusername/Apps/setgetscreenres/set_1440x900.sh'Īfter rebooting OS X, which I rarely do, I just click once on this application, and the screen resolution is (smoothly) reduced.

You can also create an AppleScript application to call the script using the OS X Script Editor in Utilities. Which would set to 1440x900, a perfect resolution for 10 inch Retina macbooks (e.g. Users/myusername/Apps/setgetscreenres/setgetscreenres 1440 900 Here is the code you'll need - thanks to those who wrote it:Ĭreate yourself e.g. This works very well and does not give the pixelish appearance of downscaling in virtualbox. I am using the scripts below to reduce resolution on the OS X side.

The most annoying tweak is the fact that xubuntu does not like the high native screen resolution. I have assigned 3 CPUs despite the warning in VBox and about half of the RAM. The default settings were not the best (when playing back videos on the VM) and I needed some tweaking. I am running virtualbox (at this point 5.1.26) on a Macbook 2015 (OS X 10.11.6) with 8GB RAM and CPU capable of running 4 threads.

I decided to go for virtualbox since I can take full advantage of the power saving features of OS X and still use the builtin webcam, the audio system, and USB devices in ubuntu. I am not using other OS X apps while working in ubuntu which is anyway my main OS.

Lubuntu macbook battery life