VM starts as bash shell sometimes (Ubuntu GUI fails to start)

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

New VM starts ok first time, but when started after shutdown would only get as far as ubuntu-xenial login: prompt. Login as sirfuser starts bash shell.

[KrisThielemans]

This is X server stuff again. most likely your VB is out-of-date?

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

I am using 5.2.8, the latest so far as I can see from VB site.

[KrisThielemans]

ok. too bad. This will then be a problem with Ubuntu/the Vagrant box/VBox. Sigh. will presumably have to be flagged upstream, but not sure where...

Maybe try a "sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get upgrade" and hope it disappears...

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

No, update+upgrade did not help

[paskino]

I've installed the VGA for 5.2.8, so that should work. At any rate, could you please test whether installing VGA to your VM solves the problem?

open a terminal

sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media
sudo /media/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
sudo shutdown -r now

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

mount: no medium found on /dev/sr0

[paskino]

try sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media instead

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media
instead of
sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media
?
(looks identical to me)

[paskino]

@evgueni-ovtchinnikov try to insert guest addition CD first

[KrisThielemans]

can we please try update_VGA.sh instead to the manual commands? (as a debugging check). still needs you to "insert the CD" as above

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

tried update_VGA.sh, restarted - no difference

[paskino]

did you insert the cd?

insert the CD, run update_VGA.sh. If that doesn't work try the other commands.

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

what CD?

[paskino]

this #77 (comment)

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

nothing happens when I click there

[paskino]

insert the CD clickin' there and then do the update_VGA.sh or manual steps

[KrisThielemans]

update_VGA.sh should error out if it didn't find the Guest Additions CD, so if it didn't, it should have updated your Guest Additions. This is somewhat unlikely to help as it seems that the VGA should be the same version.

[KrisThielemans]

@evgueni-ovtchinnikov, what kind of error message are you getting in your console when this happens?

I've just had a case (with the old VM) where it said something like

[drm:vbox_bo_push_sysram [vboxvideo]] *ERROR*  unpin bad xxxxxxx

with xxxxxxx some hexadecimal number.

I found a post that discusses this in 2016 with older VBox which recommends to adding the following to grub.cfg

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="iomem=relaxed"

I have no clue if this is still necessary. Let's only try this if you get the same error.

[paskino]

The issue was fixed by reinstalling the VGA.

[KrisThielemans]

reinstalling the VGA fixed it for me as well, but I have the following in the start-up logs (sudo journalctl -b0 --system _COMM=system)

 Failed to start vboxadd-service.service. 

I discovered that the virtualbox-guest-utils ubuntu package was installed. This could create a conflict with the VGA installed from the CDROM. VBox recommends to use the latter. So, I did the following (after a bit of research)

sudo  apt-get install build-essential module-assistant
sudo /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-*/uninstall.sh
sudo apt-get purge virtualb*
sudo reboot

Then I used the update_VGA.sh script to install the VGA.

After that, the vboxadd-service is ok. I haven't had any X server problems yet.

So... @paskino, can you please try to create a new VM, do the above, check if the service runs, report back, export a new VM?

[KrisThielemans]

This hasn't fixed the problem. I just did a reboot where the X-server failed to start (blinking screen). I also noticed that the VM captures the mouse (but doesn't display it), which is quite annoying. I can get out of that by pressing the Host key once (right-ctrl on Windows by default). That confirms it's a VGA problem.

I've run update_VGA.sh. That does lots of stuff but reports "something went wrong, but proceeding anyway". I don't know what went wrong. I'll do an occasional report and let you know.

@paskino, can you see if you have the same update_VGA.sh error and investigate a bit?

[paskino]

This has been solved by ensuring to run
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

had this problem again

solution that worked for me:

cd devel/CCPPETMR_VM/scripts
sudo ./update_VGA.sh
click on Devices->Insert Guest Addition CD when prompted to insert CD
reset VM

BTW sudo update_VGA.sh in the home folder did not work (did not find the script - without sudo it did, but update failed)

[KrisThielemans]

can you check which step in update_VM.sh needs sudo? I'd like to avoid it as much as possible

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

sorry, it was update_VGA.sh of course

apparently mount -t iso9660 /dev/sr0 /media/cdrom failed as the last message before the failure was

"CD still not found. Trying /dev/sr0 !"

[KrisThielemans]

ok. let's leave this closed as I have no clue what we can do about it :-;

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

the trick i used to get the blinking vm running no longer works - now after reset i get lots of error messages from cloud-init (failed to establish a new connection: network is unreachable/connection refused) and blinking prompt is back

[paskino]

What trick?

update_VGA.sh didn't work? What's the output?

I have to run it every now and again but so far it's done its job.

[evgueni-ovtchinnikov]

please see my comments on sep 28, just above my previous message

[KrisThielemans]

closing is we haven't had this in ages, and it's not in our control anyway.