Paul Wise: > On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 1:32 PM Chris Knadle wrote: > >> A logical place to check or the lack of BIOS virtualization features and >> show an >> error message for this would be within the .postinst script for the >> virtualbox >> package in Debian. This way when Virtualbox is installed the user >> installing it >> can be warned that VT-x or AMD-V isn't active and give a hint as to how to >> fix >> it. Alternatively a /usr/share/doc/virtualbox/README.Debian file could >> contain >> a warning about this for the user to read, which assumes the user knows to >> look >> for that. [I checked -- right now the virtualbox source package in Debian >> contains neither AFAICT.] > > I think printing errors like this in the postinst is unlikely to > attract the attention of users who such a warning might be targetted > at.
Yes I'm also concerned about that; we (Debian Developers) have been discussing that issue for a long time. A Debconf prompt is probably better, but it's also more invasive and those are meant to be avoided unless necessary. And in this case the issue started with a Debian VM running in VirtualBox on a Windows host. *shrug* > Even for the extra-technical ones who do read their apt logs > judiciously (or have a script to do that for them), it also doesn't > fix the situation when folks are running Debian VMs in VirtualBox > running on other platforms. > > So probably the VirtualBox UI should be indicating the lack of > VT-x/AMD-V and inducing users to reboot and turn that on in their boot > firmware. Looking at the code, I think this is already the case. In the source package for VirtualBox in Sid I see text for warnings related to this in translation files such as src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/nls/VirtualBox_eu.ts; however they don't appear in src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/nls/VirtualBox_en.ts. The VirtualBox_en.ts and qt_en.ts files are significantly shorter than other translations, but I think that's due to the English translation being built-in. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle chris.kna...@coredump.us