Gnome 3 display problems, VB 4.0.10 under Mac OS 10.5.8

[JustinLHeuser]

Fellow VirtualBox users -

Using VirtualBox 4.0.8 running under Mac OS 10.5.8 Leopard, I was able to run Ubuntu 11.04 Unity. Fedora 15 only worked in classic. But when I upgraded to VB 4.0.10, neither Ubuntu 11.04 nor Fedora 15 worked. I was able to restore functionality by removing the 4.0.10 Guest Additions (hellooo run level 3), running the 4.0.10 uninstaller, and then re-installing 4.0.8.

Fedora 15 with Guest Additions 4.0.10 looked fine until I logged in in classic mode. Once I did that, it just displayed large white rectangles. Sometimes the whole virtual display large. When it wasn't the whole display, the Fedora default wallpaper was behind the white rectangles. At least, that's what I remember -- there was considerable thrashing around with this issue, as you can imagine.

Ubuntu 11.04 with Guest Additions 4.0.10 also looked fine until I logged in. Once I did that under Unity, it displayed the default wallpaper. Occasionally my own wallpaper and some of the windows would flicker into view, with the dock (or whatever they call it) on the left and the menu at the top as just gray rectangles. This flickering-in-and-out did not seem to correlate to anything I was doing with the VM - it happened even when the VM did not have focus. When the default wallpaper was on display, I could see my own wallpaper and windows (complete with gray blobs) displayed very small in the lower left-hand corner of the virtual display. In this context, "very small" means about the size of the image displayed in the OS X dock icon.

Now, 10.5.8 Leopard is a release behind -- about to be two when Lion comes out. Does Oracle not support the combination of Gnome 3 on VirtualBox under Mac OS 10.5? Or do the symptoms suggest something I might have done wrong? Or is my explanation completely unclear?

Oh - Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.04 work for me without problems under both 4.0.8 and 4.0.10. Both Fedora 14 and Fedora 15 were clean installs. The Ubuntu 11.04 is an upgrade from the 10.04 (via 10.10). Both Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 had 3D acceleration turned on in the VB control panel. The Ubuntu 11.04 had 32 meg of video memory assigned in the VB control panel, the Fedora 15 had 128 meg, per recommendations in the fora (forums?) of the respective operating systems. The hardware is a mid-2007 20-inch iMac, 2GHz, 2Gb memory, and is actually about 4.5 years old.

[Perryg]

These kinds of problems (regressions) that are reproducible should be reported to bugtracker. You will need to setup an account there as it is on a different system.
It would also help if you can post the ticket number here so other can see the progress, add information, or see the final results.

[JustinLHeuser]

Thank you very much. I will make the bug report, and post a link here. But first I wanted a sanity check, to see if it might be cockpit error.

[JustinLHeuser]

A bug report, with the same title as this post, has been submitted. It is ticket 9137: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9137

[twasson]

Just giving this a +1, though with slightly different symptoms. I posted a comment on the bug report describing the issues I'm seeing, and I, also, am only seeing these issues upon upgrading from 4.0.8 to 4.0.10.

[JustinLHeuser]

Just tried again, no joy. The details are in the bug report, including various .xsession-errors files. In summary:

* I confirmed the MD5 hash for the downloaded 4.0.10 installer was correct.

* Under Ubuntu 11.4, Classic worked fine no matter how I got there. But Unity was unusable with either Guest Additions 4.0.8 or 4.0.10. But Ubuntu 11.4, Unity, and Guest Additions worked fine under VirtualBox 4.0.8.

[JustinLHeuser]

Guess I ought to update. Same symptoms under VB 4.0.12 and 4.1.0. No response from Oracle to the bug report -- or at least nobody has said "I'm from Oracle and I'm here to help you." I'm beginning to think the lights are on but nobody's home.

[Perryg]

Not really but it does seem to be an issue with the hosts graphics display drivers. At least that is what it is starting to look like. Not really sure what to tell you to try though since that would involve you updating your MAC video drivers and from what I am hearing that is not easily done. If you go to the gnome project site you can see that they are indeed aware that a lot of users are going to have issues but decided to go this direction anyway. I as a lot of others are switching to a different OS that supports gnome2 for a while longer or switch to xfce.

As a side not I do have gnome 3 working in VirtualBox on several different OSes but it did require the latest drivers from nVidia to make it happen.