VirtualBox and test releases

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 16:00 -0500, Claude Jones wrote:
> I'm trying to test Fedora 17 RC4 in a Virtual Box environment. I had 
> problems doing this with F16 as well. It is up and running, but 
> tortuously slow. I noticed that it complained when I was installing the 
> guest additions about the 'experimental x' version. Every aspect of what 
> I do is slow; bootup takes many minutes, logging in takes over a couple 
> of minutes, opening windows or programs, everything. I'm running the 
> latest version of VirtualBox from Oracle on a Win7 machine with an i5 
> CPU and 4 GB of ram. I've allocated 2 GB to the Fedora VM. Does anyone 
> else have this problem?

As ajax says, check if you're getting software rendering of GNOME Shell,
which is likely to be slow: if so you can force fallback mode from a VT,
much faster than trying to get through the control center, with this
command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session session-name 'gnome-fallback'

run it as user - not root - then log out and back in again.

Aside from that, though, there is a known bug with the kernel in Alpha
which causes slowness on some systems, it's possible it affects
VirtualBox 'machines' too. See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=795050 . The latest kernel
build fixes that issue:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-2304/kernel-3.3.0-0.rc4.git1.4.fc17

so grab that and see if it helps.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net