Virtual Box Instillation issue

[rbarnes (Ruth Barnes)]

I have been trying to install QIIME 2 using a Virtual Box and experience an issue at the start of step five. At this point a screen loads to a very dark purple screen, which then changes to a black screen with a blinking cursor. No prompt to select the user qiime2 and enter the password Qiime2 ever appears. I have tried following the installation procedure several times so have colleagues who also used QIIME2 with no success.

I use the exact settings suggested in the instructions found here https://docs.qiime2.org/2019.4/install/virtual/virtualbox/ and receive no error messages.

Any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong or how to fix this issue?

[thermokarst]

Yikes, that sounds like no fun, @rbarnes!

I suspect this is some host-system related issue. Maybe try powering off the VM and disabling 3d acceleration (if enabled). You might also need to change BIOS settings, but hopefully we don’t need to do anything there. Question: have you ever been able to run a VirtualBox VM on this machine? If so, were any of them QIIME 2 images?

[N_M]

I am currently experiencing the same problem as @rbarnes, was this issue ever resolved?

[thermokarst]

Sorry to hear that @N_M! @rbarnes didn't reply to my request for more information, not sure if they resolved their issue or not.

I will repeat what I stated above to you:

@thermokarst

I suspect this is some host-system related issue. Maybe try powering off the VM and disabling 3d acceleration (if enabled). You might also need to change BIOS settings, but hopefully we don’t need to do anything there. Question: have you ever been able to run a VirtualBox VM on this machine? If so, were any of them QIIME 2 images?

Let me know! Thanks!

[N_M]

Thanks for the reply @thermokarst!

I did try to disable 3d acceleration, though it wasn’t enabled to begin with. So I tried to restart the VM with it enabled and I was still having the same issue. This is the first VirtualBox VM I’ve tried to run, so no.

[thermokarst]

@N_M

This is the first VirtualBox VM I’ve tried to run, so no.

Your computer might need to have its BIOS settings changed to enable hardware virtualization. Unfortunately that process is highly specific, so we can't really help too much, but search for something along the lines of MY COMPUTER MODEL enable hardware virtualization. You will be looking for results related to editing your BIOS configuration, most likely. Keep us posted!

[N_M]

The hardware virtualization was already enabled in the BIOS settings on my computer. Do you have any other ideas of what might be wrong?

[thermokarst]

No clue - sorry! I am still 99% convinced that this is specific to your local computing environment. Have another machine you can try on? How about performing a docker of native installation?

[N_M]

I did try installing a docker, though I don’t currently have the version of windows that was required to download it. However, I managed to get around the qiime 2 issue I was experiencing yesterday by removing the 2019.7 version from virtualbox and then reinstalling the 2019.4 version.