Since I had some struggles with Debian-based Dev VM this week, I want to share a heads up for others using Debian in a VM.
After updating my guest OS from Debian 11 (bullseye) VM to Debian 12 (bookworm) and installing the VBox guest additions I ran into the problem that Xorg won’t come up. Virtual consoles would not work either. Black screen, cursor not blinking.
Fortunately, the old Linux kernel 5.10 was still installed and could be selected from GRUB’s boot menu. With this kernel, the system came up successfully. Upon inspecting the kernel messages via sudo journalctl, I could see a kernel call trace related to the fb driver (related to fb_release). @ssumpf apparently hit a similar issue before (on his Gentoo VM) and recommended uninstalling Xorg’s fbdev driver. After removing the xserver-xorg-video-fbdev package, the system comes up again using the regular kernel version 6.1. Apparently, Xorg selects vboxvideo but loads and probes the fbdev driver anyway, which fails.
Hearing this, I find it a little surprising/disappointing that Linux [distros] would fail in this way, in 2024…
Talking about Linux struggles, a couple weeks ago I downloaded the latest Ubuntu LTS, flashed it to a USB stick, and tried to boot it up on my T410, aiming to install it on a blank SATA drive I had just received. The boot up process seems to work initially, it says “Ubuntu 24 LTS” on a purple screen, then the text disappears and nothing happens (waited for 15 minutes, nothing changes as I just stare at glorious blank purple-ness, no reaction to mouse or keyboard, had to do a hard shutdown eventualy). A quick search shows Ubuntu linux should (of course) work well on a T410.
So it goes to show, if one thinks “this is mainstream stuff, it will be easy to install, then I get to be a first class citizen for developing with Genode on PCs and maybe even get my feet wet on the PinePhone”, one can get disappointed ^^. Maybe I can try something else than Ubuntu but that one is recommended for Genode development. Will rethink this later on.
To follow up, I cannot fully recommend installing the VBox guest additions from the official iso because I noticed that those seem to eat my middle-mouse-button events when using the event-filter’s <button-scroll> feature.
When using this feature, both press and release events are delivered at once upon releasing the mouse button (and not having moved the mouse while holding it). Apparently, the too-quick press-release sequence of the button gets swallowed by the guest additions. When removing the indirection and thereby naturally slowing down the press-release sequence as observed by VirtualBox, the events come through.
After uninstalling the guest additions, I get back my middle mouse button. But the desktop does no longer adapt to the resizing of the guest window.
Thanks for the warning! I’m sure I would have stumbled on this sooner rather than later, and it probably would have taken me a lot longer than you to track it down.
I don’t remember ever having a problem with Debian Stable (although I don’t do very many fresh installs). In most of my VMs, I use Debian Unstable, which also rarely causes problems, but every once in a while…
Thank you to you both for mentionning Debian. Unlike Ubuntu, it did install, so that was the ticket to (re)entering the Linux world for me. The core image itself is less than 700 MiB and boots instantly – it does require an internet connection to download most of the distro, which took a while, but that’s life with a slow WAN access ^^
Currently using it for building Genode. Gotta get used to the copy-paste strange behavior and keyboard shortcuts oddities in Linux, but other than that it’s looking good so far. I’ll post about Terminal issues in the relevant topic.