I am currently trying to get postmarketOS in a VM in VirtualBox. I have one small issue though. LightDM will not start. Even after running it just stops. The output of that command says that LightDM does start, however after running it says it it is stopped.
Here are the commands I used to convert Alpine Linux to postmarketOS after adding the key and repository.
I also set the display memory to 128MB and I am using the VBoxVGA display controller. There is also 4GB ram and 2 cores assigned to the VM. There is also a 30GB HDD.
Can someone help me? I would really like this VM to work.
Please do not say to run this in QEMU, as all of my VMs are in VBox and I am not going to install another VM program for one VM.

From https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Phosh don't know if it'll work but..

I've tried PureOS with phosh in virtualbox with no luck. It would boot till just before the gui started then hang with a flashing cursor. With qemu booted perfectly, don't know what the difference is.

I just tried that and it froze the OS. Black screen, no cursor, no tty. Completely unresposive.
I think this is an issue with LightDM and not Phosh. I tried weston as well. Only GNOME and XFCE4 worked.

Well Phosh and Weston are both wayland DE's, which could potentially Have something to do with this. Have you tried installing a different display manager?

On the postmarketOS wiki it shows that LightDM will automatically start phosh. I tried installing GDM and SLiM.
GDM worked, because it is GNOME. Phosh didn’t show up in the sessions. SLIM bricked it. I had to reinstall. On top of all that X is now reporting that there are no screens. Crap.

I got rid of the VM. Do not answer anymore.

I know that I said not to reply anymore, but Phosh is most definitely not the issue. I downloaded the QEMU image and ran it in VBox and with one hiccup (mouse not recognised, fixed by changing pointing device to PS/2 mouse) it ran perfectly (without mouse cursor, but that isn't an issue as I have a touch screen monitor, even adds similarity for real devices running PureOS phosh) Try running it.
Not sure what the issue is. Might be the initramfs however I haven't gotten that to work.

I'm going to try this again.

Hey thanks for the update. I've actually started using Phosh pretty regularly recently. It's the default desktop for Mobian and shipped with PostmarketOS on my new smartphone.

I'm still using a vm to develop apps for mobile linux since it's easier than trying to code on the phone. And my computer is much faster at compiling.

It’s a pretty nice UI, isn’t it? I’m also going to assume you got a PinePhone since they (had) have a postmarketOS community edition that ships with pmOS.

Anyway, back to what this thread started with. I’m going to attempt to install the QEMU amd64 image to the hard disk. I’m going to try using syslinux as the bootloader.

Update: I managed to boot the kernel and initramfs. The initramfs cannot detect the root partition or boot partition though.

I am going to just run pmOS in qemu from now on. It doesn’t work in vbox and is going to be much easier to run in qemu.

Fighting with VB is what got me started using qemu as well. I really like that I can set the resolution to a actual phone resolution for these mobile OS's. Helps visualize what the os/app will look like on the device.

Yep. I do have one very small issue before getting the vm to work. I have Windows 10 on my main laptop and it has secure boot locked on and thus I cannot get linux up and running. I have to create the vm inside of VBox and then transfer it out.

I’m still quite puzzled as to why PostmarketOS works perfectly in QEMU but not in VBox.

Oh and there is a aarch64 version of QEMU so you can install native apps. Is much slower than x86_64 however.

You might contact one of the PMOS Devs. They seem like very nice people from what I've interacted with them.

But yes, I keep virtual box for other distros/OS's, for some things it works much better.

Well...



It took a full hour to set the dang thing up. It also has crazy lag spikes for no reason sometimes. But hey, it's better than nothing!

*yes I know I spelt success wrong, there was a lag spike at the time.