Setting up VirtualBox on NAS4Free

Turn VirtualBox On

Make sure the selected folder does exist.


No matter how I tried, I can not shut VM gracefully. So I would just send ACPI shutdown to a VM. It would be marked as Stopping and just hang there. I usually restart VistualBox using this GUI.

Guest VM Settings

Few comments on VM settings:

• Disable nested paging
• CD is mounted to an image of the Ubuntu server installation CD.

Guest Set-up

Install hung on me in preparing headers phase at 83%.  Seems to common.  Another time it told me linux install failed.  Finally I went back to the VM settings and set the HD to be SSD.  Then install completed.

Helpful: instructions to set Ubuntu as a guest OS.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install dkms
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-dkms

The latter seem to install 5.1.34 modules while my host runs VirtualBox 5.2.8.  Hmmm .  I dig have a guest additions CD for 5.2.8.  Should have used that!  Tried it.  Install script succeeds but upon reboot VirtualBox service fails to start and SATA erros are abound.  I will be sticking with older guest add-ons - at least those start.

To install default desktop GUI I did:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

But during this installation I get:

ata3.00: exception Emask 
ata3.00: failed command: FLUSH CACHE

And if I resume and continue the installation, it does get completed, but then upon the reboot into graphical mode, the VM is aborted.
So, it is not an unmitigated success by any stretch.