[sf-lug] (forw) Re: (forw) Re: SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday 02022020

[Rick Moen]

Bobbie wrote:

> Actually CentOS rather than Fedora whcih is generally Live.

Whatever.  That's really rather beside the point (but no, Fedora is not
'generally live'; it's merely distro policy to provide both install and
live images).

> Experiences differ between users as do objectives and daily
> life.  Mine have been that VB requires
> fairly regular updates.  

...which for the Linux host-OS version arrive as distro packages.

> Each is rather large.

So?  Are you paying for Internet access by the byte and having your
files delivered to you by modem?  If so, you're going to _hate_
LibreOffice.


> I simply do not know what is going wrong.

Without objection, I specifically did _not_ ask what is going wrong --
which in my experience just invites the user to speculate (usually badly
and misleadingly), which IMO you do rather too much of at the best of
times, making helping you inherently difficult.  

Rather, I asked what the _symptom_ is.  That's entirely different.

> I take hours to install a file, shut down the file, shut down VB and
> restart the next day or week and find that my time had been ill spent
> as the Virtual Box when it restarts cannot see or load the file
> previously installed.

I'm put in a familiar position, here, where it's difficult to help you
because you're being vague, because you obviously took _no_
contemporaneous notes no matter how many times I and others have
stressed how important that is to troubleshooting, and because I have a
troubled (and familiar) realisation that you might be mis-citing key
facts and sending any aspiring helpers down a lengthy wild goose-chase.

I mentioned in my prior post that it's a really bad sign when I am
obliged to guess what you mean, and we're at that point again.  You say
'install a file':  Does that mean create a VM, mount a distro ISO file
as a virtual optical drive, and then attempt to boot the virtual drive
and install a guest OS from it?

If you mean that, was installation initially successful in the sense
that you had the guest Linux OS running in a VM that could be rebooted
like a real machine?  

If you don't mean that, what the gehenna does 'install a file' and 'shut
down the file' mean?  (On reflection, it's also pretty obvious that 'file'
cannot mean the same thing in both consecutive mentions in that
sentence.  Maybe the first 'file' refers to an ISO file, and the second
refers to a VM.  It's difficult to tell.)


Here's a kind of gestalt-ish wild guess about what you're encountering:

After getting VirtualBox (or any similar hypervisor) going, whenever you
crete a VM, initially that's just back-end stored in some small internal
housekeeping files.  Upon actually booting something in the VM
environment and installing a guest OS there, obviously a much larger
amount of data needs to get written to one of the hypervisor's diretory
trees, in the form of one or more large virtual disk file.

By convention, such files when used by VirtualBox have filename
extension .vdi or .vmdk, depending on details, as described here:
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch05.html#vdidetails

What I'm thinking about is this slightly vague (in a critical place)
clause of yours:

  the Virtual Box when it restarts cannot see or load the file
  previously installed

Sadly, I'm probably going to be sabotaged, here, by the fact that you're
tending to use the word 'file' to mean everything and nothing.  But,
with that ominous warning:  Maybe, just maybe, you mean this:

You install VirtualBox (the hypervisor package).  It works.  You create
a VM.  Inside that VM, you install a Linux distro to serve as a guest
OS.  Initially, this appears to work.  After a while, you shut various
things down.  On a later occasion, you restart VirtualBox.  The VM you
created is still listed as something supposedly known to VirtualBox, 
but, then when you attempt to boot the VM, VirtualBox reports failure
because it can no longer find the virtual disk file required for the
guest OS.

Maybe you mean that.  Maybe you mean something else.

If you _do_ mean that, then stop deleting or moving VirtualBox's virtual
disk files, and you'll have a lot better luck.


As usual, trying to help you with a technical problem is starting to
look like an exercise in frustration and wasted time, with awesomely
large opportunities for multiple wild goose-chases, and frankly I need
to do more-productive things.


> It should indeed but many distributions these days are designed
> for a single language use.

If so, irrelevant, since I already provided a link with screenshots
proving that this is not the case for Kaisen Linux.

(I really am boggled to imagine what on God's green earth you would be
doing with an obscure system rescue distro, but that's your affair.)