I'm a Windows user who has experience with Linux, but not much. I've been using WAMP on Windows, but I want to experiment with setting up a developer machine in VirtualBox. I just installed Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS on my 64 Bit Windows system and it seems like I've been having nothing but problems.
- I am using the newest LTS
- I have updated and upgraded with apt
- The install said it was successful and I could login fine the first time, but all I got was a black screen and it was hung. After about 10 minutes I tried rebooting, powering off, restarting and at some point, without me doing anything else or making other changes, it finally let me login.
- Once I was at the "panther" desktop I kept getting some annoying popup about an error, but it wasn't very specific -- the message was generic -- and so I went on a rabbit trail of online research seeking solutions and I did find a blog that said basically said "just ignore it or clear out the error logs because you can't do anything about the errors anyway"
- Finally, I found something about changing the video settings and then things seemed to work, but everything was slow. I changed video settings again and performance seemed better.
- I still had issues with installing GuestAdditions so I kept researching. I was getting a popup error and found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHvLJXLD5Qs which offered this solution:
Here are the commands used for VirtualBox guest additions:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt install build-essential dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)
I typed the commands into terminal and nothing seemed to break. Next, he said just close terminal and click Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD Image. He said this is what you should see:
What you should see when you select "Insert Guest Additions"
Instead, this is ERROR that I am getting:
ERROR: Unable to insert virtual optical disk:
Then I found this video https://youtu.be/5_fluJuJc6E?t=55 which advised to go to Settings > Storage and then "Remove Attachment" for the VirtualBoxGuestAdditions.iso file that was already there. I did that and it removed fine. But, after re-launching the VM, now all I get is a black screen (AGAIN) and it seems like were are going in circles somehow. I've been at this for hours and I know it shouldn't be this complicated.
SUMMARY
So, just to sum up after Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS installed and gave me a "successful" message, I experienced these problems:
Black screen - couldn't login. Then all of a sudden I finally got a purple screen and was able to login. But the machine has been slow since day one (or hour one, about 3 hours ago) even though the host machine works great. Adjusted some video settings to see if it would improve the speed of the machine, both booting and in general use. Some improvement, but not total. Have not been able to install guest additions in any way (neither through CLI, nor through GUI. Though my knowledge of Linux is limited, it seems like these issues are all related, but I've not had much luck getting it solved on my own.
Now, I can't boot into the virtual machine again. It gives me this error:
"Could not insert the C:\Program
Files\Oracle\VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso disk image file into
the virtual machine Ubuntu_20.04_2022 as the machine has no optical
drives. Please add a drive using the storage page of the virtual
machine settings window."
"The machine has no optical drives":
(NOTE: This is NOT a duplicate of this post Black Screen after Installing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS because it did not offer the answer I need and doesn't address the VirtualBox aspect)
