VB 5.1.4/Ubuntu guest not working on Win 7

[jnb]

I fired up my VirtualBox under Windows 7 (64-bit) Home Premium for the first time in a few weeks, having left it working fine (with clean shutdown, AFAIK).

It told me there was a new version of "VB Extensions", I just clicked to allow it to install (I did not pay much heed; AFAIR I had not seen this "Extensions" thing in the past). It installed OK. Started the VB for my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (its About reports "Version 5.1.4 r110228 (Qt5.5.1)"). After Ubuntu "5 dots" loading screen, it just goes to blank, black screen. Have to do "direct power off" to shutdown. Reboots do not fix.

On a whim, I eventually tried switching off "Enable 3D Acceleration" (which was working fine before), and lo & behold, it gets into Ubuntu! From there, I mounted the "Guest Additions" image and let it install the 5.14 GA, which went fine. Rebooted. No change: still works without 3D, but still black screens with 3D. I attach VBox.log in the "black screen" state (having re-enabled 3D Acceleration for this).

I am now stuck not knowing how to proceed, as follows:

• I cannot use the current state much because the window/desktop stays at a fixed, small size (640x480?). Full-screening simply enlarges the "border" area to fill the screen, the Ubuntu desktop stays at small size. Dialogs exceed screen size, etc. Have I forgotten that I have to do something to increase the resolution??
• Is 3D Acceleration supposed to work OK? Has something in VB 5.1.4 broken compatibility (I seem to have an NVidia GeForce GTS 450)?
• Should I try downloading & reverting to an older VB (e.g. 5.0.26 from July)? I am a little concerned in case anything has happened that might make it not work; for example, I have installed 5.1.4 Guest Additions, I have shutdown the Guest cleanly from 5.1.4 now...

Yours in frustration, and thanks for any help.....

[mpack]

Moved to Linux Guests.

AFAIR I had not seen this "Extensions" thing in the past)

You didn't see it this time either. There is no just thing as guest extensions in VirtualBox. It's important that you report error and other messages precisely.

Ubuntu has it's own fork of VirtualBox, and they bundle the additions for their fork in the Ubuntu distro. You should not use forked GAs with the official version of VirtualBox. There's no telling what it will do. And this is precisely what you have done:

00:00:23.670564 VMMDev: Guest Additions information report: Version 4.3.36 r105129 '4.3.36_Ubuntu'

You need to uninstall this Ubuntu package and install the correct VirtualBox GAs, which is bundled with VirtualBox (see Devices|Insert GAs CD). There's no need to download it separately.

[jnb]

Moved to Linux Guests.

AFAIR I had not seen this "Extensions" thing in the past)

You didn't see it this time either. There is no just thing as guest extensions in VirtualBox. It's important that you report error and other messages precisely.

If "there is no such thing", what is the file "Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.1.4.vbox-extpack" which I have now found in my Windows ".VirtualBox" folder dated earlier today? This is exactly what it ran. To the best of my knowledge, no such file existed in the past....

Ubuntu has it's own fork of VirtualBox, and they bundle the additions for their fork in the Ubuntu distro. You should not use forked GAs with the official version of VirtualBox. There's no telling what it will do. And this is precisely what you have done:

00:00:23.670564 VMMDev: Guest Additions information report: Version 4.3.36 r105129 '4.3.36_Ubuntu'

You need to uninstall this Ubuntu package and install the correct VirtualBox GAs, which is bundled with VirtualBox (see Devices|Insert GAs CD). There's no need to download it separately.

I have done nothing wrong "intentionally". All that happened was that when I fired up Oracle VB this morning it asked me to install something and I accepted it, as I have done in the past....

Thank you for your advice. I shall attempt to follow what you have said shortly. Please be patient with a user like me; it may be obvious to you how [not] to proceed, but this VBoxAdditions/Extensions, and an apparent distinction between what is supplied with Ubuntu versus what is supplied with VB, is far from obvious to me.

[mpack]

I said there was no such thing as guest extensions. The extension pack you mention is installed on the host. Both the extension pack and the Guest Additions are described in the user manual. And, as I said, the point is that you should report error messages accurately so that we aren't led down the garden path.

An Ubuntu guest has no idea that it's running as a VM and certainly will not prompt you to update your host's extension pack. In any case the host extension pack version should be synchronised with the the host software it's intended for, hence you'll never get a prompt to update this independantly.

What you got was a prompt from the Ubuntu package manager (or whatever it calls itself) to update the Guest Additions which are bundled with Ubuntu. These are for the Ubuntu fork and you should have disabled or uninstalled this package when you installed the official version of VirtualBox. No matter, you can do it now. We here can't help you with problems you have with software that doesn't come from here.

[jnb]

@mpack
Well, thank you for your help. Unfortunately I am quite stuck now. The only way I know to uninstall GA is to run the uninstall inside Ubuntu, which I have done. And the only way I know to install Oracle's GA is to ensure I have the right version (I have "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxGuestAdditions.iso" dated 16th August 2016, so I presume that came with VB), and from VB's Device menu I go "Insert Guest Additions CD Image..." and when it auto-runs it installs and says it's 5.1.4. I agree the VBox.log has "Guest Additions information report: Version 4.3.36 r105129 '4.3.36_Ubuntu'" in it, I have no understanding where that comes from. The only thing that is different today is the existence of this "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\ExtensionPacks\Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack" folder. You say "What you got was a prompt from the Ubuntu package manager (or whatever it calls itself) to update the Guest Additions which are bundled with Ubuntu", and I'll take your word for it, but seems pretty strange to me that it has installed something in "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\ExtensionPacks", that's way outside of Ubuntu, but there you are.

Whichever way up, I cannot get my VB/Ubuntu to work any longer. Not your problem but mine, and I'm pretty fed up.........

[mpack]

It's possible that you have both versions of the GAs installed, which will certainly add to the confusion. You need to get rid of the forked GAs. I'm not an Ubuntu user and can't give you detailed advice on how to do that. The Ubuntu forums might have that answer.

[Perryg]

You need to purge the packages. Usually you can use apt-get purge virt, or vbox or Virt and a list will come up telling you the package names that can be removed. Or you can install synaptic and search it for virt and remove anything related to VirtualBox. The software center is totally useless and I suggest you install synaptic and do it from there.

[yurtesen]

@jnb run

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get --purge remove 'virtualbox-guest-*'

Then reboot and check if you still see anything in kernel modules with

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lsmod | grep vbox

There shouldnt be any vbox* modules there since you uninstalled and virtualbox shouldnt show any guest utils installed.
Once you are sure that nothing is installed, you can try to re-install stuff...

Was it virtualbox which told you that there is an update guest additions? so actually ubuntu package was working and virtualbox broke it?

[jnb]

I did the

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get --purge remove 'virtualbox-guest-*'

It uninstalled a couple of things. It made no difference to my problems.

I found that I could now manually fetch a new version of VB, 5.0.16 (which was not available last week). Installed it (and its Extensions), upgrading from 5.0.14, then did the "Insert Guest Additions" install. Lo and behold, my desktop is now resizable not stuck in 640x480, I can switch on "3D Acceleration" again!! All is well, in that I now have a useable Ubuntu Guest again, finally

Note that my VBox.log still has line "00:00:19.967902 VMMDev: Guest Additions information report: Version 4.3.22 r98236 '4.3.22_Ubuntu'" in it. I do not dispute that this might indicate something is not as it should be, but now my system works fine.

So I think the advice I needed was that something had somehow gone wrong with the VB 5.0.14 install, and reinstalling/upgrading seems to have sorted it out...