Host system is Mabox Linux 6.15.3-1. Have virtualbox 7.1.10 installed there, and am trying to make a Mabox guest VM (for testing) using the 6.12.34-1 .iso file. Virtualization is enabled in BIOS; Intel 13th-gen CPU, lots of RAM. Host system has ran fine for a long time; nvidia RTX 3060, drivers installed. Tried VMSVGA and VBoxSVGA, no change; tried installing guest additions, same. Gave the VMs 8GB of RAM and 128GB of disk space. Tried with and without swap. Did not try 3D acceleration.
When the Mabox VM is initially booted (live mode), everything seems fine. The windows of the windowing manager (openbox) all work as expected, and it is totally usable. However, after Mabox is installed to that VM and rebooted, the insanity begins:
The first VM I created, had many bizarre dmesg errors (in addition to the following.) It had audio enabled, so decided to try again without that.
The second VM attempt has audio disabled. It has zero dmesg errors or warnings. Unsure if that is related to the errors.
At boot, some of the conkies are incompletely drawn.
The mabox2111.tint2rc (the top bar) is frequently not drawn at all, or is initially, then disappears at first mouse-over or use. Nothing brings it back. When it is visible, the icons for web browser, terminal etc, do not line up with their clickable area.
There is a major issue with all windows not being redrawn. If a window is initially drawn, it will not be redrawn again until shaded and restored (or minimized and restored.) This makes using the terminal awful, as you can’t see typing for instance, and must keep minimizing and restoring it to see any changes.
Some windows do not draw initially, so there is no visible way to control them at all.
What can we try? Openbox works fine in live mode VM, but not after install? Thanks.
Interesting - disabling picom on just the mabox guest totally fixes it, even with kernel 6.12.34-1. Both qemu/kvm and virtualbox work with picom disabled on the guest. So there appears to be some kind of a glitch with VM compositing (or further configuration needed) with this cpu + video card.
That is a clear case of something going wrong between the Live session and the installed system — likely related to graphics rendering and how Openbox and Mabox customizations are interacting with VirtualBox’s display stack after install.
The fact that the Live session behaves normally, but the installed system shows redraw glitches, disappearing panels, and broken window behavior, strongly points to a graphics driver or compositing issue specific to the VM environment.
Here’s what your friend can try, one step at a time, to pin it down or fix it:
First, boot into the installed VM and do this from a TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F2):
Force fallback to software rendering:
Edit or create a file like this: sudo nano /etc/environment
Add the following lines:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
GALLIUM_DRIVER=softpipe
Then reboot. This disables hardware acceleration for rendering and forces a full software fallback, which often fixes redraw problems in VMs. I’ve found putting questions like this to ChatGPT often reveals surprising solutions!
VBox does not like the newest picom. Downgrading to picom 11.2-1 should fix it. I install xcompmgr then edit open box autostart commenting out picom and adding xcompmgr.
