Installing BCE with a virtual machine

[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Hi all,

I'm re-installing BCE for the first time in a number of years.  I'm following along in the Quick Start Guide and have gotten to where it says, "With the machine selected, click Start, and proceed with the Ubuntu installation as normal," but I'm not sure what "installation as normal" is supposed ot look like. When I start up the virtual machine and initiate the Ubuntu installation, I get a screen that warns me that all partitions and data will be erased.  Is that correct? I want to make sure I'm not going to erase everything on the computer I'm using to run the virtual machine!  

/ Lara

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Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov    (she / they)  (hear my name)

Digital Records Archivist | Archives & Special Collections 

University of Minnesota Libraries | lib.umn.edu | 612.626.7972

I acknowledge that the University of Minnesota is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of Indigenous people and was built with money from slaveholders. 

[Kam Woods]

Yes, that will overwrite all partitions and data *in the file the VM is using as disk*. The Ubuntu installer does not have any visibility of the system disk when installing in a VirtualBox VM.

Kam

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[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Thanks. 

 I'm also getting this message when the virtual machine starts up:

It goes away after a minute or two.  Should I be concerned?

Anyway, I seem to have gotten Ubuntu installed.  I'm now trying to follow the next instructions, "Once you have completed installing Ubuntu in a VirtualBox virtual machine, it’s a good time to install the VirtualBox guest additions, since both media automounts and software autorun will be disabled after deploying the BitCurator install script in the next section. First, you must install some package so that the guest additions can be built as a kernel module. Open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc make perl dkms
sudo reboot

I opened a terminal and entered the first line, and I got 

[sudo: authenticate] Password:

What password is this? When I set up Ubuntu I unchecked the "require password" box, but it made me create a password to proceed.  I entered the password I created, but it failed, with multiple attempts.

/ Lara

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[Kam Woods]

Answers below, but of note: you are installing Ubuntu 26.04. BitCurator is not currently compatible with Ubuntu 26.04. Our documentation notes that you must currently use 22.04 or 24.04 (https://github.com/bitcurator/bitcurator-salt). We'll have a release for 26.04 within the next couple of months, but we're a very small all-volunteer team and these things take more time than they would otherwise.

Unchecking the "require password to log in" box is a different requirement than setting a password for your account, as you probably have surmised. The password to execute commands as sudo is your account password. If it's not working, common causes are: (1) you mistyped the original password when setting up the VM, or are mistyping it now, (2) you have caps lock on accidentally (or had it on during install). If it's (1), and you cannot determine what the password you created is, your only real option is to install Ubuntu again in a fresh VM.

Regarding the vmgfx error - that indicates an incompatibility between VirtualBox and the graphics driver Ubuntu is attempting to use. This is a known issue for 26.04 installs in some versions of VirtualBox on some hardware. You can attempt a few things you can attempt when running into errors like this: (1) Ensure you're running the latest version of VirtualBox on your host platform, (2) switch the graphics controller in VirtualBox from VMSVGA to VBoxSVGA, and (3) ensuring you have the video memory for the VM set to the max (128MB). Both of those settings are in Display->Screen in Settings for the specific VM you're working with in VirtualBox. You may have to experiment with settings, or check the VirtualBox forums depending on what hardware you're using.

Kam

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[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Thanks, Kam.

I created a new VM using Ubuntu 24.04. I was able to resolve the vmgvx error by switching the graphics controller to VBoxSVGA.  

I got as far as trying to install the "Virtual Box Guest Additions," where we are instructed to run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc make perl dkms
sudo reboot

I ran the first two, but I can't tell if they did what they are supposed to do.  I took screenshots of the results and put the in this doc.  Does this look like success?

If not, one thing that I suspect could be an issue is that the machine I am using, which is a FRED is set up with a non-routable IP address for security reasons.  This often means that I have to configure various software with proxy settings so it can access the Internet.  I poked around in Virtual Box but could not find a place to do that, if it is even an issue.  

/ Lara

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