Linux

[SOLVED] openSUSE Tumbleweed VirtualBox guest: Resolution stuck at 800x600 after fresh install

A VirtualBox Guest Additions bug defined in the Ticket #19496 caused my freshly installed openSUSE Tumbleweed to have resolution stuck at 800x600. This blog post is about my experiments and observations.

Mohan Sreekant

Mohan Sreekant

— 2 min read

The plan was to install openSUSE Tumbleweed as a VirtualBox guest in an openSUSE Leap 15.1 host with VirtualBox version 6.0.18_SUSE r136238 installed in it. Got the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed Network Image - openSUSE-Tumbleweed-NET-x86_64-Snapshot20200509-Media.iso.

RESOLUTION STUCK AT 800x600

Installation was smooth and uneventful. The only issue is that the resolution is 800x600. The Display utility in KDE Plasma 5 lets me change the resolution and it works for a couple of seconds and reverts to 800x600.

My experience with openSUSE Tumbleweed as a VirtualBox guest has always been good. Not this time. However, before blaming  it, I wanted to understand the root cause of the problem.

Looked around on the world wide web and found that the VirtualBox bug tracker has Ticket #19496 already open for the same issue:

The virtualbox 6.1.6 update seems to be okay, but if the matching guest  additions is applied to the guest, the auto-resize or resize to any  resolution is unavailable.  I applied guest additions to several hosts  before discovering this issue, including Centos-6, Centos-7, Centos-8,  kali linux, and OracleLinux-8.  Guests that have not gotten the update  seem to be working fine.

MY EXPERIMENTS

VirtualBox Guest Additions from openSUSE repositories

I checked if VirtualBox Guest Additions were installed by default or not:

zypper se --installed-only | grep virtualbox
i  |  virtualbox-kmp-default  |  Kernel modules for VirtualBox  |  package

Surprisingly, found the packages missing. I was expecting them to be present. I installed virtualbox-guest-tools and virtualbox-guest-x11 and restarted the machine:

sudo zypper in virtualbox-guest-tools virtualbox-guest-x11
sudo reboot

Did not work. So, the bug seems to be affecting openSUSE Tumbleweed too. I purged the packages:

sudo zypper rm virtualbox-guest-tools virtualbox-guest-x11

VirtualBox Guest Additions from VirtualBox repositories

On the host running openSUSE Leap 15.1:

VirtualBox UI -> Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD image...

The download began, but failed. Twice. So,:

sudo zypper in  kernel-devel gcc make

  • Inserted it into the  virtual machine and:
cd /run/media/msiyer/VBox_GAs_6.0.18
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

The output was a bit confusing:

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 6.0.18 Guest Additions for Linux........
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
Copying additional installer modules ...
Installing additional modules ...
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel 
modules.  This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions:   /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup <version>
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions:   /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the modules for kernel 5.6.11-1-default.

VirtualBox Guest Additions: Look at /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log to find out what 
went wrong
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until 
the system is restarted

Even without a restart the resolution was properly set and all was beautiful. I restarted for good measure. All is well.

CONCLUSION

  • Virtualbox 6.1.6 is broken - Ticket #19496
  • Packages virtualbox-guest-tools and virtualbox-guest-x11 not available by default in openSUSE Tumbleweed. The packages do not work even when installed.
  • Installed VirtualBox Guest Additions by downloading iso from VirtualBox website.
  • Success.

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