MX 17/18 Repository: The Virtual Box Thread

[dolphin_oracle]

it appears to me that the virtualbox 6 configuration for new VM's defaults to vmmware drivers rather than the virtualbox graphics drivers that work with the guest-additions. you can switch this in the "Display" area of the virtualbox VM machine configuration pages.

[ozfossil]

hello Dolphin - I am having ongoing issues with Virtual box and all versions of MX - I saw your advice that stretch had issues with VB 6.xx - but I thought I found a bug in MX19 when it is supposed to have Guest Additions pre loaded - well it did not seem to work for me - messages that said it could not find them and offered to download them - it instantly crashed the MX19 instance. Today I tried to get a damaged (due in part I guess to recent Kernal update bug) and it too won't allow a Guest Additions download - instantly crashing the MX18 instance.

Clearly I can't be sure where the issue is - but I have made major changes to my system - buying a brand new SSD and installing fresh and more stable host OS's (currently using Solus as they had good documentation on how to deploy VB) - I have even tried to stay away from VB in case this is one of the flies in the ointment - and gave Gnome Boxes a whirl - however this seems to be too unreliable and crashes or freezes too often - and MX does not like it much.

there are one of two software packages that are must haves for me - one is Manager.io - which has been bullet proof in previous Linux Flavours - but now with MX having issues in so many areas for me - I just can't get it to work - it will crash in MX18 so there is code that is not Debian compatible for that to work - I wanted so much for MX to be my daily driver - but even these forums are confusing to me - there is no simple link in the software (MX) to report bugs (for either 18.xx or 19.xx) - I am not even sure you will get this message as the thread I have responded to gives me no confirmation of what I am responding to.

Initially I wanted to try to change to the alternate video driver - as you mentioned that VM Ware was the new default in VB 6.xx however in my version of VB (VirtualBox Graphical User Interface Version 6.0.12_Solus r132055) I can't identify which is the VM Ware driver - none say VM Ware - So for me it would have been beneficial to state which one to select as the preferred driver.

[dolphin_oracle]

@ozfossil

on my virtualbox 6, the graphics controller under "Dispaly" in the virtualbox machine settings had defaulted to vmware driver of some sort. I selected VBoxSVGA and it went well.

I can tell you that all official versions of MX have the virtualbox guest additions already installed, although MX17/18 have the older 5.24 version.

screenshot of the VB setting to check.

[Stevo]

VBox 6.0.12 is also giving me a warning to switch from VboxVGA to the VBoxSVGA graphics if I have 3D acceleration enabled, since support for the first will be dropped in version 6.1.

[asqwerth]

VBox 6.0.12 is also giving me a warning to switch from VboxVGA to the VBoxSVGA graphics if I have 3D acceleration enabled, since support for the first will be dropped in version 6.1.

Take the warning seriously.

In my Neon install, I'd already updated VB to 6.1 and when I tried to open my VM for MX16-32bit, it showed an error, with NO settings option to switch to VBoxSVGA.

Luckily I have so many distros on my system, and my MX17/18 installs don't have VB 6.1 yet. So I used the version 6.0+ in MX to set all my VMs to VBoxSVGA, including the MX16 one.

[Stevo]

We now have updated to the latest Virtual Box 6.1.4 in the MX 17 through 19 test repos (remember that this thread is for MX 17/18).

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• Virtualization core: Fixed a rare issue with ICEBP instruction causing guru meditations on Intel hosts (6.1.0 regression; bug #19171)

• Virtualization core: Fixed macOS Catalina guests failing to boot after upgrading to 10.15.2 onwards (bug #19188)

• GUI: recent NLS integration and bug fixes for GUI and Qt translation tags

• USB: Fix isochronous transfers to the VM for xHCI

• Serial: Fix buffer handling, avoiding receiving stale data when the receive queue is flushed (bug #18671)

• VBoxManage: Restore old --clipboard option for modifyvm command

• Linux guest: Support Linux 5.5 (bug #19145)

• Linux guest: Shared folder fix for loopback mounting of images

• BIOS: Always report non-ATA disks as ready

• BIOS: Report EFI support through DMI table (bug 19144)

• VGA BIOS: Reduce stack space usage for INT 10h handlers

[Stevo]

Updated to 6.1.6 in the test repo, backported from Debian Sid. Among other things, this adds support for 5.6 kernels.

[Stevo]

Now updated to 6.1.8 in our test repo! It's working fine for me so far.

[Stevo]

Updated to 6.1.10 in the test repo. Among other changes, this is supposed to be compatible with the 5.7 kernel.

[Stevo]

Updated to the latest 6.1.16 in the MX 17 test repo, backported from Debian Sid. Among other improvements, this version will build and work on 5.9 kernels.

This is not a trivial backport, but I documented my tweaks in debian/changelog.