Fedora 29 Guest not working for me

[psand]

Just wondering if anyone has had any luck with getting a Fedora 29 guest up and running? (I realize that F29 isn't even scheduled to go beta until 9/18.)

This is on a Windows 10 host with relatively generic Dell hardware, running VirtualBox 5.2.18. (The last thing I tried was upgrading to
development version 5.2.19; not extensively tested, but seems to give the same results described below.)

I've been bringing up Fedora guests on this system for a couple years now, so I don't think I'm doing anything obviously stupid. (But feel free to helpfully disagree with that.)

I use the "Cinnamon Spin" Live CD ISO, but get similar results with other F29 Live CD images. And I've been trying this, off and on, since they have been offering F29 spins, a couple weeks now. Most recently, the 9/1 spin from yesterday.

Symptom: creating a new guest and booting the Live CD image brings up a menu, the primary option being "Test this media & start Fedora-Cinnamon-Live 29". The boot process hangs, and does not display the LiveCD login screen as it should. Last message on screen "[OK] Started Network Manager Script Dispatcher Service". (The "Starting Light Display Manager" message appears a couple lines above that, but not seeing any evidence of that onscreen.)

It's possible to complete the boot by picking "Troubleshooting" on the first menu, and then "Start Fedora-Cinnamon-Live 29 in basic graphics mode". Cinnamon seems to reliably crash a few seconds after login. (Haven't tried other spins this far.) "Install to Hard Disk" works from that point, but the installed system also reliably crashes Cinnamon, even after applying updates.

I am checking the "Live CD/DVD" box on the Storage tab on system settings. Even though I'm unclear on what that does.

F29 seems to be using the 4.18.5 kernel.

Insight? Am I missing the "make it work" option somewhere?

Attaching gzipped VBox.log from a "default" LiveCD boot.

[andyp73]

00:00:02.866336   VRamSize         <integer> = 0x0000000001000000 (16 777 216, 16 MB)

I would start by increasing this to 128MB or 256MB as its current setting is too small for most modern Linux running with a desktop manager.

-Andy.

[psand]

Thanks for the suggestion. Increasing Video Memory to 128MB (the max I can get on the Display Settings slider) doesn't appear to improve things for me. Hangs up at the same spot when I boot the ISO & Start F29.

I believe my previous Fedora guests (F24, F25, F26, F27, F28) all worked OK with the default 16MB video memory.

I will keep futzing around with the higher setting, though. (Nothing to lose at this point.)

[andyp73]

Have you got a download link for the ISO image you are using? I'll download it and give it a spin here.

-Andy.

[psand]

The spin directory is https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora ... 86_64/iso/ . The contents are a moving target, with new versions appearing every 1-4 days. I've been concentrating on the Cinnamon spin, because that's what I like. But my limited experimentation with the other spins (or the "default" ISO in https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora ... 86_64/iso/) gives similar bad (hang on boot) behavior.

Good luck!

[andyp73]

I have downloaded the Fedora-Cinnamon-Live-x86_64-29-20180902.n.0.iso file from the URL you gave and have created a VM for it on my macOS host running VirtualBox 5.2.16.

It goes through the initial boot sequence quite fast but then gets very slow once it starts doing anything graphical. The initial black screen sits there for an age before bringing up the login screen. Trying to log in then takes another age before the desktop is displayed but eventually we do get to here:

VirtualBox_Fedora 29_03_09_2018_18_41_22.png (35.32 KiB) Viewed 6979 times

I'm guessing this is down to the software rendering mode being used.

-Andy.

[psand]

Thanks for your testing efforts. I assume you didn't use any non-default settings?

Not that it matters to the issue I'm having, but the "software rendering" thing seems to be normal early in the Fedora release cycle. I haven't noticed any major performance problems that it warns about, and at some point it goes away when the release matures.

I got a little farther yesterday using the default (Gnome 3) F29 Live CD dated 9/3. This successfully booted, the install to the virtual hard drive seemed to go OK, but the resulting install wouldn't boot successfully: the gnome initial setup screen fails to appear. (It's tough to tell what's going on, because this is where I would create my user account; without that, I can't log in to examine processes, logs, etc.)

The 9/3 Cinnamon spin didn't work for me, same results as reported above.

It seems my only option is just keep trying new images as they're generated.

[andyp73]

Thanks for your testing efforts. I assume you didn't use any non-default settings?

It was configured using the Fedora 64bit template and then I made the following changes (which I make to all my VMs): video memory to 128MB, network set to bridged to my wired Ethernet adapter, pointing device changed to PS/2 mouse from the default USB tablet.

-Andy.

[psand]

For the record, if anyone's interested, I was able to get a seemingly-stable Cinnamon environment working in a Fedora 29 guest. Via:

1) using the F29 "netinst" ISO at https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora ... 86_64/iso/ (Datestamp 20180905)

2) At andyp73's suggestion, I bumped up video memory to 128 MB. (I didn't test to see if the 16 MB default would work.)

3) The installation proceeded normally; rebooted and logged into a working GNOME 3 environment.

4) Then installed cinnamon via "dnf install @cinnamon-desktop-environment"

5) Disabled selinux in /etc/selinux/config (I always do that anyway, just thought I'd mention).

6) Rebooted, logged into working Cinnamon environment.

Note that I haven't played with it much, so all "working" claims should be understood with a "as near as I can tell" disclaimer.

I tried the 20180905-datestamped "Cinnamon spin" in https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora ... 86_64/iso/ first, with similar non-working results as described above.

I realize this is far from an ideal resolution: I don't know what the problem was, let alone what made things work. But it doesn't seem to have been a Virtualbox problem.

[psand]

Just one more note: in order to install Guest Additions in F29, I needed to install the latest test build of VirtualBox (as of today, 9/6/2018). This seems to be due to F29 using kernel 4.18; the GA code in the current 5.2.18 version is incompatible.