Manjaro GNOME 25.0.10 won't boot in Virtualbox VM

[Molski]

The worst part of all open source virtualisation options, is the emulated video performance. Virtualbox gives you those 3 that pretty much all suck perform the same.

@philm mentioned Gnome Boxes, I use virt-manager (and have for over a decade), but they both have the same libvirt/kvm backend, which I believe is superior in most respects.

One of them is video performance. You get more options, but the best one is usually the Red Hat developed VirtIO drivers (in both Windows and Linux guests).

I pass my GPU to my guests that need video performance. But when using software emulated video, I do think Boxes (easier?) or Virtual-Manager (more flexible) are both better in this respect.

But looking through your guest logs, I noticed it tried all 3 of these modules first..

Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (WW) Warning, couldn't open module vboxvideo
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (WW) Warning, couldn't open module fbdev
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (WW) Warning, couldn't open module vesa

Then this gets used, and it seems like it’s throwing errors or messing up. (But I have no idea what it should look like)

Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) modeset(0): using drv /dev/dri/card0
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (WW) VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) modeset(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]:         "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (==) modeset(0): Depth 24, (==) framebuffer bpp 32
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (==) modeset(0): RGB weight 888
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (==) modeset(0): Default visual is TrueColor
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) Loading sub module "glamoregl"
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl"
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]:         compiled for 1.21.1.18, module version = 1.0.1
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]:         ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: pci id for fd 14: 80ee:beef, driver (null)
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: pci id for fd 15: 80ee:beef, driver (null)
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: pci id for fd 16: 80ee:beef, driver (null)
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: pci id for fd 15: 80ee:beef, driver (null)
Okt 26 15:09:22 mkb-virtualbox /usr/lib/gdm-x-session[674]: pci id for fd 16: 80ee:beef, driver (null)

[mkb]

@philm

For the brave ones, you may want to test the daily builds of Manjaro GNOME

Hey, thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely give these one’s a try.

@Molski

But when using software emulated video, I do think Boxes (easier?) or Virtual-Manager (more flexible) are both better in this respect.

Thanks for the thorough deep dive. I think I’ll stick to GNOME Boxes and ditch Virtualbox for the forseeable future. I’ll also take a look at virt-manager

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FWIW, out of despiration I checked with ChatGPT yesterday about this gnome-weather error. It pointed to a discussion in the Archlinux forums, where someone describes the exact same problem.

They removed the gnome weather app but if I get that right then it seems to be because of an update to glib from 2.84.4 to 2.86.0 . Haven’t tested it yet but will give it a try as well.

[mkb]

Good news. I guess the most recent [Testing Update] 2025-11-10 update did fix the issue somehow.

When I revisited my prior GNOME boxes installation (where I switched backed to ‘stable’ to get it running again) and did another switch to the ‘testing’ branch, everything worked fine/gdm was running without any issue. Reached runlevel 5, logged in (automatically) and GNOME was up and running.

Haven’t done anything in particular. Just miraculously works all of a sudden. Phew!

[mkb]

@mkb

Even the german mirrors reported several 404 errors for me over the last days.

Turns out I missed out on an important point in the pacman-mirrors man page:

   After all operations ALWAYS syncronize and update your system with

          sudo pacman -Syyu

When I did sudo pacman -Syyu after messing around with pacman-mirrors, those mentioned 404 errors disappeared.