I am struggling to use virtual box with debian stable (jessie) as guest OS under windows 8.1 as host OS.
The installation of debian was simple, but logging into the guest OS is causing lots of trouble. After many attempts of adjusting various parameters I succeeded in being able to login to the debian jessie with following parameters:
- video memory: 128 MB
- Enable 3D acceleration: true
- Enable PAE/NX: true
- Enable I/O APIC: true
- Use Host I/O Cache: true
- Solid-state Drive: true
and a virtual disk drive of 16 GB and 2048 MB memory for the virtual machine.
I did many attempts at adjusting parameters, because in most of the cases the debian guest OS would boot up and show a black screen instead of login screen, show login screen for some seconds and then freeze, show login screen and freeze after 5-10 keyboard inputs, or not render login screen correctly. Some of the configurations would randomly end up in any of the above mentioned states when rebooting with the same parameters.
Finally, after randomly adjusting the parameters and rebooting the guest OS many many times, I managed log into the guest OS with the lxde window manager.
However, after closing down virtual box and opening it again and trying to run the guest OS, I ended up with black or broken login screens again.
After a couple of attempts on rebooting the guest and host OS, I managed to get the guest OS running again... (without any parameter adjustment)
Why this random behavior?, what am I doing wrong? is there something I need to install in the host OS or guest OS, or is there some parameters that can cause random behavior? Are there any more reliable virtual machines out there?
The host machine is a lenovo x250 with intel i3, 16 GB memory, 256 GB SSD and windows 8.1 64bit. VirtualBox is version 4.3.28.