Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

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HankG

Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by HankG »

Follow up. VirtualBox 5.1 is an even bigger disaster than 5.0. It has more display artifacts under Mint 17.3 than 5.0 did and it didn't fix any of the problems for Mint 18. I did an experiment with the latest VB 4.x under OSX 10.11. When it first comes up it doesn't support 3D acceleration, as one would expect with 5.x drivers loaded. Once I loaded the 4.x guest additions everything worked fine. I installed Chromium and that worked fine too. In fact, unlike VB 5.0 with Mint 17.x where I would get weird artifacting within the Chromium app but then everything cleared up, under VB 4.x it rendered perfectly from the very beginning. I'm thinking I may just ditch VB 5 and go back to VB 4...
Cosmo.
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by Cosmo. »

HankG wrote:I'm thinking I may just ditch VB 5 and go back to VB 4...
Theoretically a good idea. But for users with Mint 18 as host also not available.

Perhaps(!) there is one workaround for Mint 18 users for now (but don't ask me, how well it will work): In case you find, that 5.0.18 from the repository should work better than 5.1 (as Hank stated), you can try to use - in contrast to the general rule - the guest additions for 5.0.16. They are still available on the download page, because of the regressions, that the 5.0.18 GA introduced.

At this time it seems, that users, who rely on a working VB, should not upgrade from Mint 17.x to Mint 18.
Total_Blue
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by Total_Blue »

HankG wrote:Follow up. VirtualBox 5.1 is an even bigger disaster than 5.0. It has more display artifacts under Mint 17.3 than 5.0 did and it didn't fix any of the problems for Mint 18.
Have you tried posting a message in the Virtualbox forums? Someone there may have an answer as to why you are having these issues.
https://forums.virtualbox.org/

Under General, there is a specific forum for VirtualBox on Mac OS X Hosts.
HankG

Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by HankG »

Cosmo. wrote:
HankG wrote:I'm thinking I may just ditch VB 5 and go back to VB 4...
Theoretically a good idea. But for users with Mint 18 as host also not available.

Perhaps(!) there is one workaround for Mint 18 users for now (but don't ask me, how well it will work): In case you find, that 5.0.18 from the repository should work better than 5.1 (as Hank stated), you can try to use - in contrast to the general rule - the guest additions for 5.0.16. They are still available on the download page, because of the regressions, that the 5.0.18 GA introduced.

At this time it seems, that users, who rely on a working VB, should not upgrade from Mint 17.x to Mint 18.
Actually, Mint 18 worked flawlessly (for the limited time I used it) under VirtualBox 4.x. Yes, I had to manually install the Guest Additions but at least everything worked well after that. I've since reset everything to be Virtualbox 5.0.24 and am sticking with Mint 17.3 for the time being.
HankG

Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by HankG »

I've been having better luck under 5.0.20. I still need to install guest additions, but I set the system updater to not do kernel updates anymore. So far It's been working and Electron isn't sucking. That's a bit of a shame because kernel security updates was something I was looking forward to getting again with the new updater system :(. If the stability holds though (I'm going to do some new development in the fresh VM), then maybe I'll be good to go for the time being.
Total_Blue
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by Total_Blue »

Just read this interesting tidbit regarding Linux Mint 18 and Virtualbox at http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3051#comment-131619 in regards to the Software Rendering Mode issue.

"The default Mint install doesn’t contain VirtualBox graphics drivers because it’s such a wildly moving target – every new version of VirtualBox requires new drivers. The Guest Additions package is needed for that." :o
rene
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by rene »

The default Mint install does however contain them. It's just that they're not working.
ajgreeny
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by ajgreeny »

It looks to me, unless I've missed something on this thread, that those having problems are using a different version of the guest additions to their version of VBox.

I am using the repositories of VBox in my Xubuntu 14.04 having added them with the instruction shown on the VBox site at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads using the Debian-based Linux distributions section. That tells me every time it is updated to install the new version of GA to match, and a few clicks does that quickly and easily.

The repos of Mint still have VBox 5.0.18 and GA of the same version, which seems to be the cause of this difficulty; or have I missed something here?
rene
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by rene »

ajgreeny wrote:It looks to me, unless I've missed something on this thread, that those having problems are using a different version of the guest additions to their version of VBox.
No, Total_Blue verified above the problems present with a vanilla Mint 18 guest (which includes the VB 5.0.18 guest additions) running under a Mint 18, VB 5.0.18 host. I myself can verify that although the Cinnamon software-rendering is in and of itself not present on a Mint 17.3, VB 5.0.24 host running a Mint 18 guest with its 5.0.18 additions replaced by the 5.0.24 addition, lots of screen corruption issues are.

VB 5.0 has at this point (as per Cosmo) apparently also been withdrawn by Oracle specifically for the Ubuntu 16.04 base. Replacing the Mint 18 standard 5.0.18 additions with the 5.0.16 additions that Oracle is still offering and seeing in which range of host versions this solves anything, if any, could be interesting -- but I myself will for now simply stop playing with Mint 18.
HankG

Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by HankG »

Another update. I was able to get something workable for Mint 18 with Virtualbox 5.0.20 (after manually installing the guest additions) with an OSX host OS. However on my Windows 10 box running 5.0.24 (I can't be messing around with VB versions as easily on that system) I could never get Chromium to render correctly once I got 3D acceleration working. In fact it consistently irrevocably corrupted the whole display after a few minutes. I tried 64 and 128MB of VRAM. I tried toggling through the various emulation types. Nothing worked correctly.
dwelden

Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by dwelden »

Hi folks, the noob is back ;-)

As I have been following the conversations a thought has occurred that I want to throw out and get your take on it. If you look at my original screen shot that I posted, you can see the Cinnamon notification that Software Rendering is in use side by side with glxinfo saying that it is not software rendering. Could it be that Guest Additions are just fine, but that Cinnamon is not correctly detecting that hardware rendering is in effect?
Cosmo.
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by Cosmo. »

No. I have here - with LM 17.3 as host and VB 4.3.38 running - as well as LM 17.x (all variants) and multiple LM 18 guests. As soon as I install the guest additions 4.3.38 and activate 3D-support, all Mint guests work properly (leaving at this point several not related problems with LM 18 out).
jansef

Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by jansef »

Got the same issues on Linux Mint 18 Sarah and solved them as follows:

I am on Oracle VirtualBox version 5.2.2 r119230 (Qt5.6.2)
installed VBoxGuestAdditions_5.0.18.iso from:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.18/

and enabled 3D acceleration.

Cheers.
J.
Cosmo.
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Re: Sarah Cinnamon running without video hardware acceleration under Virtual Box

Post by Cosmo. »

The version of VB and the guest additions have to match perfectly. Remove the ols guest additions inside of the guest machine and install the guest additions from the devices menu of the running guest. Reboot is needed between each step.

BTW: Not a good idea to use such an old thread, you should better have created a new one.
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