2 week old Ubuntu 18.04 install.
As a requirement of running a android device emulator for Android studio, I had to install KVM, so I installed it (the exact package name was kvm, it had some dependencies), and now my computer won't boot. It just sits there with a purple screen.
No keyboard or mouse input has any effect (including REISUB).
I have googled and nothing relevant comes up (it's all about booting VMs, understandably).
I have no idea what to do, especially since I cannot interact directly with my OS.
I still have my boot stick (that I used to install 18.04), and I can boot off that.
Turns out that installing linux-kvm actually doesn't install a VM program, it just installs another kernal that's obsolete, puts it at the top of the grub list, and that's how it breaks your computer.
I fixed it by using boot-repair (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair).
Installed virt-manager,
target virtual machine is debian jessie with spice-vdagent installed
shared clipboard, and latency-free mouse input works
Display: Spice
Video: QXL
Channel spice: spicevmc, virtio, com.redhat.spice.0 (confirmed /dev devices exist in target vm)
Make sure guest resizing is enabled in virt-manager:
Menu View -> Scale Display ->
Auto resize VM with window (Checked)
Make sure your have a spice agent on your guest (the virtual machine)
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html#guest
'spice-vdagent' on linux
'spice-guest-tools' on windows
How I figured this out,
I found a setting in "spicy" that I assumed had an equivalent in virt-maanger. To connect with spicy from spice-client-gtk apt package, I found the port to connect to by checking sudo ss -nlp | grep qemu, and connected to that port on localhost. Spicy's toggle was much easier to find: Options -> Resize guest to match window size (Checked).
For XFCE, this is a known bug which does not appear to have been fixed yet (confirmed still broken in Xubuntu 20.04).
This issue is due to a change in spice-vdagent whereby instead of changing the resolution directly, it instead notifies the DE to make the change, and that functionality has not been implemented yet in XFCE.
One workaround is to run the following in the guest every time you resize your window:
$ xrandr --output Virtual-1 --auto
According to Installing Windows 10 in KVM + libvirt, visit Spice then scroll down to Windows binaries and then click the link spice guest tools. Proceed to install the spice tools after download completes. Once installation is complete, you should be able to get the guest VM resolution to match that of the resized VM window.
For me, "Auto resize VM with window" was greyed out until I installed the spice guest tools; I did not even have to reboot after installation - this feature was available immediately and it just worked - :).
Host machine: Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (Xenial Xerus)
Guest VM: Windows 10 Pro (Version 1809 build 17763.379)
#ThorSummoner's approach works, but if you have a high resolution monitor, the guest video driver may not have enough memory to draw the larger screen. In that case, you will need to increase the video memory, but unfortunately the virt-manager GUI doesn't provide a method to do so. So instead follow this procedure:
View -> Details -> copy the UUID.
sudo virsh edit <copied uuid>
Look for a line like the following: <model type='qxl' ram='65536' vram='65536' vgamem='16384' heads='1' primary='yes'/>. Your type and other parameters may be different, but as long as there's a vgamem, you can continue.
Change vgamem to 32768
Save & exit. The config file will automatically be checked for errors.
Then restart your VM, and try again.
Short answer that worked for me:
I also have Display set to Spice. If the VM's virtual Video hardware was set to VGA or QXL, I could not resize the desktop in the guest. When I changed Video to Virtio in virt-manager and restarted the VM, it worked.
Longer background in case it's useful to future visitors:
I ran into this problem in May 2020 and while the older answers here were of some help I thought I'd add some clarifications since the virt-manager UI and libvirt capabilities continuously evolve.
In my case, I have a Fedora 32 (KDE Spin) Linux host and the same OS in the guest. My virt-manager version is 2.2.1.
As with thorsummoner's original situation above I am using Display Spice so I can have goodies like the shared clipboard between host and guest.
The guest seemed stuck on 1024x768. xrandr in the guest showed lots of higher resolutions available, but when I tried to set the resolution to 1920x1080 -- whether with xrandr --output Virtual-1 --mode 1920x1080 or with Plasma's Display setting -- it would only momentarily change to the higher resolution. Then, clunk, it would change right back.
Explicitly setting a higher level VGA video memory did not work (although it did help for another problem long ago).
No matter what I set virt-manager's View -> Scale to display menu options to, this still happened.
The fix for me was in the virtual hardware Video settings. Note: not Display, but a separate entry further down in the left-hand-side Hardware list in virt-manager.
If video was set to VGA or QXL, I could not resize the guest.
Then I changed the video hardware to Virtio, and the problem went away. I could resize the desktop with either xrandr commands or the GUI Display preferences, and the changes would stick even after restarts.
Of course the guest VM should be cleanly shut down before making this change to its virtual hardware settings.
What worked for me is much simplified modified ThorSummoner's answer:
Step 1:
View > Scale Display > Always
Step 2:
View > Scale Display > Auto Resize VM with window
Step 3:
In the guest OS, set the desired resolution.
I tried everything I saw to make it work but the only thing that worked for me was to set video to QXL (didn't tried Virtio or VGA after that tho) and do a proper shutdown of the Windows 10 VM (from inside the VM, do a "shutdown"). If you use the reboot from virt-manager it seem's like it doesn't reboot entirely.
What worked for me (finally!):
Debian 11.6 on my host laptop.
Debian unstable as my guest VM.
In the guest, "apt install spice-vdagent".
In the guest details (View / Details):
Display Spice = Spice Server
Video = QXL
View / Scale Display = Always
When logged into KDE Plasma (X11) as my Desktop Environment, the View / Scale Display had the "Auto-resize window with VM" option selected, but it was grayed out and KDE's resolution would not resize as I changed the guest window size; it would scale to some degree, but it seemed to be using a magnification effect rather than actually changing the resolution.
When logged into Cinnamon or into Gnome (just plain "Gnome", not "Gnome Wayland" or "Gnome on Xorg" or any of the other Gnome options in my selection pull-down menu), the View / Scale / Auto-resize was not grayed out, and both DE's resized as I resized the guest window.
Note: the resizing was not instantaneous; it took a second or two after I finished resizing the guest window before the DE changed resolution to match.
In my case, I had manually set resolution to 1920x1080 prior to booting with SPICE vdagent. I just had to go to settings, display (will depend slightly between DE), and select the resolution corresponding to SPICE resize mode.
For those of you who still haven't got virt to auto-resize with suggested config (spice channel, spice guest tool, QXL), this is how I solved mine.
Background: I got it to auto resized before, but I got a clean install of ubuntu, and using the same config, same vm files (was actually physical partition), but I can't get it to resize again. I got spice channel in the config with QXL video, spice guest tools in windows guest, but still can get it to resize.
So finally, I just got a clean install of both windows and my distro (this is not the solution, just indicating that my config was clean). I tried again with the same config but nothing work, and I started to wonder if windows I the problem here, which it ultimately was. I checked the device manager to see that 2 virtio drivers were rejected by windows secure boot. So as an instinct I went in tiano bios (ovmf) and disable secure boot. It's working fine now.
Form me it was just a matter of going to the VM click Show virtual hardware details icon, resize that window, then click back on the Show the graphical window icon since they share the same window.
Resizing on Windows guest works if you install the virtio display driver.
Open "Device Manager", right click on "Display adapters", right click on the one entry you find, then "Update driver", browse for a driver, select the virtio ISO, and install the driver.
Notice the entry won't be displayed with a yellow warning sign, as Windows will use the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter drivers, and so it is all fine for it.
After installing Xamarin studio and Xamarin android player along with Oracle VirtualBox. I have created demo code and installed Nexus 4 (kitkat) virtual device in Android player but after running application Xamarin Android player gets started but got following window with error.
This worked for me:
Network Connections -> Right click VirtualBox Host-Only Network -> Properties -> Enable (or Disable then Enable) "VirtualBox NDIS6 Bridged Networking Driver"
I found another question similar to the current question. see it Here
If you are using windows 10 then you need to have latest version of virtual box installed. you can get it from Virtual Box Downloads page.
I hope it helps.
I have installed NetBSD 6.1.5 with full installation setting. However, when I run startx it says no screens could be found. So i tried "X -configure" and then "X -config ~/xconfig.conf.new" and I was brought to a very generic screen with a black x crosshair, but I was unable to exit this using the suggested ctrl+alt+backspace, so I had to force power off and check if my keyboard was recognized in the conf file generated, which it was. I have installed xdm, xterm, Xorg, and other X programs.
I am not familiar with setting up desktop environments from scratch. I am a newb who is used to Ubuntu esque installers doing that stuff for me.
Would someone be able to walk me though the installation or point me to a link which explains a step by step process?
What happens if you rename your xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf? Does startx or xdm work then?
Are you running this inside a VirtualBox or other emulator?
I have NetBSD on a Thinkpad T420 which I occasionally boot into Windows, and I've setup VirtualBox to be able to run the same NetBSD install when I'm in Windows. The key difference in the xorg.conf file is in the Device section:
Section "Device"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection
Also I've found the free version of http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ very handy - I use it to ssh into the virtual NetBSD box and then run X apps and have them display on the Windows desktop.
Final note - you might want to look out for the NetBSD-7 RC1 which should be out 'Real Soon Now', as there are some very handy improvements, including better support for most modern display hardware :)
I found that running startx from any directory with a .xinitrc file gives strange behavior in amd64 6.1.5 and 6.1.4. Delete (or rename) any .xinitrc files and try
xinit /path/to/windowmanager
Please read Chapter 9 of NetBSD Guide:
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-x.html
Section 9.9 discusses installing various Desktop Managers/Environments.
It turns out that I could run "X -config xorg.conf.new" as root on host and then ssh using putty to manually launch windows.
My virtual machine of 64-bit Debian 7.5 (wheezy) was working in VirtualBox 4.3.12r93733 on a Windows 8.1 Pro (64-bit Operating System, x64-based processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 v2 # 3.70GHz 3.69 GHz) machine (Dell Precision T3610) yesterday. But when I tried it this morning I got an error message saying: VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. I chose to continue but as promised I made it as far as choosing between system modes (regular or recovery) before the screen blacked out.
When I searched this message online I found answers saying to make sure the BIOS had virtualization enabled. My BIOS has 3 options under Virtualization Support: Virtualization, Virtualization for Direct I/O, and Trusted Execution. The first two were enabled but the last was not. (This is a work machine, so I am hesitant to load defaults without speaking to someone from IT first.)
Aside from downloading and initiating an install for Visual Studio Express 2012 (which has since been uninstalled), little has happened on this machine since the Debian virtual machine was last working. So I also investigated and uninstalled the Windows Updates from yesterday on, in case they were involved. (One in particular mentioned having to fix the BIOS.) The ones that were marked important, including the one that fixes BIOS, have been reinstalled.
At this point I started looking into VirtualBox's settings. In my online research I found several forum posts recommended going into Settings->System->Acceleration, a tab that is greyed out for me. While at Settings->System->Motherboard, I noticed my pointing device was set to USB Tablet. When I changed it to PS/2 Mouse and tried the VirtualBox again, the error message went away but the OS still does not successfully boot.
My most recent revelation happened after this: Under Settings->General->Basic, I noticed my version was set to Ubuntu (32 bit), even though I am sure it was at Debian (64 bit) yesterday. But only 32-bit OS's are options, when my machine ought to be capable of having 64-bit ones too.
My question is: What could have caused VirtualBox to lose all 64 bit options, including a working Debian (64 bit), overnight?
You probably have had Hyper-V installed and enabled.
Cross check and Disable the setting from :
Control Panel >> Programs and Features >> Turn Windows features on or off
Reference : https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=57926
try this on virtualbox:
go to your virtual machine setting (right click on VM icon > setting) then go to system > acceleration and ensure that "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" checkbox is checked.