Screen / Graphics lag on ubuntu 12.10 on alienware M14x r2

Question

I'm new to ubuntu so please forgive my ignorance.

I recently bought an alienware M14x R2 with a '1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M' vide card. I followed this tutorial to installed Ubuntu 12.10 on Virtualbox 4.2.8 but am experiencing serious screen/graphics lag. The host sytem is windows 7 & I have a intel i7-3630QM processor.

So far I've tried:

1. Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions from the VB device menu, the installtion completed succesfully but did not resolve the screen lag issue.

2. I installed bumblebee as descibed in their wiki. It seemed to install correctly but after reboot did nothing. The terminal commands where:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

   sudo apt-get update

3. Then I tried to install the guest additions on the ubuntu CLI as described here:

   • upubuntu.com/2012/08/how-to-install-virtualbox-guest.html.
   • Again this installed correctly but did nothing after reboot.
   • The terminal commands where:

     sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-additions

     sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-utils

4. Then in desporation I enabled 3d acceleration in the Virtualbox display settings, but this seemed to do nothing.
5. Finally in a last ditch effort I enabled IO APIC in the virtual box system setting & increased the number of processors to 4 CPUs.
   • This improved the screen lag a fair bit but not entirely & I still can't switch to seamless mode.
   • I'm not really sure if it's the correct resolution as I don't know if I have hardware virtulization which I've read is required for this.

Is this the correct solution or should I try something else, perhaps I need to remove some of the repositories added & start over but I'm unsure how to do this?

Any help/advice would be much appreciated, I'd be happy to add more detail if needed.

Thanks

Answer 1

Bumblebee was only designed to work when you install Ubuntu on your actual hardware, not in a virtual machine.

Virtual box emulates the hardware that the guest OS is running on. The guest OS doesn't see your actual hardware, it sees the emulated hardware. You need to remove that and install VirtualBox guest edition.

To remove bumblebee (though it is not affecting your system now)

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:bumblebee/stable

Go to the link and download the ISO file. Mount it as described here - http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#mountingadditionsiso (Follow instruction for windows host)

Then, follow - http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp19235216

In short, these instruction has three part, in linux guest

sudo apt-get install dkms

Then, in terminal, navigate to mounted ISO, like cd /media/<VBOX_ISO_NAME> (use tab to see the available options)

Then run, sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run