virtualbox.org

Hello all,

I'm having a weird problem with enabling desktop effects in a Fedora 13 image that I made. First of all, here is my environment:

Host
Windows 7 x64, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285 128MB

Guest
Fedora 13, 2GB RAM, Tried values between 64MB and 128MB for video memory, 3D Acceleration Enabled, VirtualBox 3.2.6 with GA installed.

First of all, I will admit that I don't know that much about desktop effects and the video side of VirtualBox. In an effort to get better at this, though, I have started playing around with desktop effects and the video settings in VirtualBox. I'm looking to learn so any help with that would be much appreciated.

When I try to enable Desktop Effects on the guest, I get a message saying: "Failed to start Compiz. Reverting to previous settings." I'm not sure how to figure out why this is happening. On another computer which I have, I can enable the desktop effects when the guest only has 64MB of video memory, so I don't think that the video memory is the issue. The graphics card on my host can handle Aero in Windows 7 so I don't think that it is the capabilities of the card itself. Could it be the driver for my host graphics card? As I said before, I'm new to this aspect of VirtualBox so any help or instruction that anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John

Gnome or KDE desktop?

Dang, sorry about that. It is the default, Gnome.

Strange. The only time I have seen this in Fedora 13 is when I have KDE and that is a known issue. I have Fedora 13 Gnome both 32 and 64 bit and don't have a problem with Compiz or desktop effects.

Are you sure that you have the latest drivers for you graphics card installed on the host? By the way I only have 32 MB vRam on the guest and all is well with that.

As per other posts in this forum, I to, am having a terrible with desktop-effects and Fedora 13, 32 bit distro, as a Guest. default GNOME window manager. My host is OSX Snow Tiger (10.6.4). All Ubuntu distros (32 bit) run Compiz, the same thing, just fine. It's just Fedora 13. To complicate matters, I DID get it to actually run (*namely the rotating Cube(, twice. But not again.

I took the identical Fedora 13 install CD and put it on a spare Dell laptop with all the identical rpm upgrades. And that worked perfect. I'm getting suspicious of the Guest Additions build process. Then again it might be something with the Xorg.conf file. The other pieces of the Guest Additions build process seem to work just fine.

My symptom when things don't work right is the complete iMac freezes solid. I have to power down and reboot.

Ideas?

Looking through the post that are having this problem ( I can not reproduce it ), most of them are using MAC as host. I would suggest posting a ticket on bugtracker. Search to see if it has already been posted and if so add your comments. If not create a new ticket. You will need to sign up there as well as it is on a different system. Post the ticket number here so others can see the progress and add to. Be sure to include the log file for the Fedora guest.

Thanks to all who have replied. Before posting this, I did a search for similar problems and, from the posts, it does appear that there may be some sort of bug which is causing this for OS X hosts. However, I am running a Windows 7 host so I don't necessarily know that my issue is related. One thing that makes me think that it is not related is that when I run the same virtual machine on my laptop I can enable the desktop effects. So, as part of troubleshooting, I look at the differences between the two systems. Apart from the obvious architectural differences between a desktop and a laptop, the difference between the two systems is the graphics card and its drivers. The graphics card on the desktop is not as good as the graphics card on the laptop so that may be the cause. However, I'm inclined to give less weight to that since it does have the "guts" to be able to run Aero. The next thing that I'm looking at, then, are the drivers. I am the sys admin at work so I try different things out on the desktop host. One of the things that I tried was installing the WDDM drivers which are provided from Microsoft. Microsoft says that these are drivers which the hardware maker, in this case NVIDIA, has submitted to Microsoft for inclusion in the automatic updates. On my laptop, I used the drivers from NVIDIA. In case you are wondering, to date, I have not had a problem with the WDDM driver so it has served me well.

I think that I might try downloading and installing the NVIDIA drivers on the desktop host to see if that does anything. I'll post my results to let you know.

Regards,
John

I just installed the updated graphics drivers from NVIDIA. This seems to have resolved my issue because I can now enable desktop effects in my Fedora 13 guest. This has been quite interesting and been a good exercise in finding out more about how VirtualBox works. I looked through the User Manual, but I couldn't find any "minimum specs" which a graphics card and its drivers must support. For future reference, does anybody know what those would be or, if I missed it in the User Manual, could you point out the correct page? This information might be good so that, in the future, if a person comes across this thread they can take a look at what their card supports and know if they need to upgrade the drivers. Thanks for all of the help.

Regards,
John

I don't think you will find the information in the users manual. I just looked again and did not see it off hand. I seem to remember that double buffer is a requirement but that may not be all of it. Usually the latest drivers for you graphics adapter should fix this but here again there are some like Intel Graphics 945 (IIRC) that still have problems. I will keep an eye out for others and see if their adapters are benefited by updating the drivers as well.

I have an opposite idea regarding video drivers. Since the Gurst OS, Fedora 13 in my case, apparently is reaching somewhat directly to the physical graphics card to support 3D Acceleration, I thought that maybe I might need to install the vendor specific graphics drivers in my Linux Guest. My host is the 27" iMac which has the ATI Radeon HD 4850 card. Of course I don't want to play with the drivers in OSX at all. But Linux, maybe. I don't know; I'm just drawing at straws.

In Linux, how else do I see what video drivers are installed besides "lspci". It's possible, in the virtual world, that Fedora did not know what graphics hardware was actually there and installed something generic instead. It's just a guess.

I think I will look at some of my other "successful" Linux dirtros that work perfectly and see what they think the graphics card is.

Till tonight..

You can not install vendor specific drivers in the guest. VirtualBox uses its own drivers and you will loose the ability to control the screen size and other nasty things can happen. Installing the guest additions in the guest is the only thing that you should need to do and make sure that the enable 3D effects is turned on.

Thanks for clearing that up. If installing Guest Additions is "the only thing that you should need to do and make sure that the enable 3D effects is turned on" and that doesn't work, then maybe I'll have to wait for a later release of VBox. For me, it just crashes my whole system

That and make sure that you have the latest video drivers on the host. I have seen where this has fixed a lot of problems including the Intel Graphic 945 adapter. Seems they need to add something to get it to work properly with a virtual machine. I am not that familiar with a MAC but it should not mess anything up. I update/upgrade my Linux and Windows drivers all the time.

One thing that I do find interesting is that Ubuntu, (debian type) OSes with gnome desktop will work even if Fedora will not. I have not figured that one out yet, but it must be something strange as I do not have this problem and can not reproduce it.

I can confirm that several Ubuntu distros do indeed work just fine with Desktop Effects while Fedora 13 does not. I've got Ubuntu 10.04, Lubuntu 10.04, PeppermintOS, LinuxMint8 as well as OpenSuse 11.2. They all work great. In addition OSX Leopard 10.5.8 ( on a miniMac) as a host OS also support Fedora 13 just fine. All VB versions are 3.2.6. It's just my iMac Snow Leopard (10.6.4) that crashes. BTW, all my guests are 32 bit

The mysterious part is twice, and only twice, I did get Fedora 13 to work with Desktop Effects on my iMac. glxgears worked and the rotating Cube work great (and fast). It's a mystery to me.