Enabling VT-x capabilities

Support & Help Requests
#1

I may be misunderstanding things a little, but I have just removed lubuntu from my laptop, and wanted to give ubuntu mate a go. I have installed it, but when I try to run virtualbox, I get an error informing me vt-x is not available.

Now, I have read through many other posts, and must say that my BIOS screen does not say anything about virtualisiation. I have an intel core 2 duo, which I believe supports this, so am unsure of next steps in resolving this issue. Is there something I need to enable within MATE?

Thank you for your advice,
Dan

#2

I can’t say for certain, but i don’t think there is anything to do in Mate, apart form making yourself a member of the vboxuser group. However, on my own machine, I had to enable virtualisation in the bios. So, I am guessing that there is something in there you must enable. What, exactly, I am not sure.

#3

Is there a specific error message or error code from Virtualbox that may help identify the exact issue?
And, is this the open source version from the Ubuntu repositories or from Oracle’s website? (They may be differences, you could try the other version)

VT-x Support, or something along the lines of “Virtualization”, “Virtual Machine Support” or “VM Acceleration” should be an option in the BIOS if the CPU definitely supports this. Not sure why it would deactivate if it worked previously in Lubuntu (I’m presuming?)

You can tell for sure if the kernel is aware of VT-x support if this command outputs the flag:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'vmx'

(vmx for Intel’s VT-x / svm for AMD’s SVM)

#4

Hello, thanks for that. I tried that CLI command, and it returns
nothing. Which implied to me the BIOS was old due to the fact that as
far as I know, the cpu (Intel core 2 duo) does support this, and it is
not an option.

As for it working in lubuntu, it did used to work, but that was an old
version, which may not have required it I suppose. But even then, the
fact cpuinfo shows it as unavailable, and we know it should be there, is
the big flag I think, which is why I think I need to upgrade the BIOS
with whichever version you recommend from your site.

Thanks,
Dan

#5

Virtualbox is still capable of running without acceleration. There are checkboxes under the Machine’s Settings -> System -> Acceleration tab. Of course, performance will improve with acceleration.

Upgrading the BIOS is a risky procedure, and even then, there could be chances your BIOS doesn’t support it at all. You may wish to look up your exact BIOS model to be sure.

This command lists BIOS details:

sudo dmidecode | less

#6

Thanks for the information. Sadly the ‘acceleration’ tab isn’t
available. But I can look into that separately, thanks for the note of
it though.

As for which BIOS model I have, it is: SMBIOS 2.4 apparently.

As for the risk of upgrading, I am aware of that, and will be looking
into alternatives before doing so, but need this working for business usage.

Also, from an earlier question, it is virtualbox-5.0 taken from
download.virtualbox.org

Thanks for all your help,
Dan

#7

Hmm, this isn’t the right information. :notebook: My desktop will be different to yours, but also says SMBIOS 2.4 present near the top.

I’ll highlight the details from that command:

BIOS Information
- Vendor: Award Software International, Inc.
- Version: F1
- Release Date: 02/29/2012

Further down, the motherboard itself appears in two places:

System Information
- Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
- Product Name: GA-A55M-DS2

Base Board Information
- Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
- Product Name: GA-A55M-DS2

I’ve looked in the past for a new BIOS for my Gigabyte GA-A55M-DS2, and F1 (02/29/2012) is the only version available for my motherboard. :frowning: Good luck!

I’m not 100% sure, but there might of been a time when they dropped support for systems without hardware virtualization support. Paravirtualization is a new feature in 5.0, but the older 4.3 (open source edition) of VirtualBox is available from the repositories.

#8

Gotcha, okay, the correct results were:

Vendor: Acer
Version: V1.11
Release Date: 08/28/2008

Based on this info, I can see that if it comes down to it, I can get the 1.7 version from the acer website. Although Acer will not tell me whether it supports virtualisation or not compared to 1.1.

Note: the laptop is an acer aspire 2930 (and is quite old, although the cpu should still be able to handle this)