Sorry for the long post, but it does give a walkthrough of how this is working now in Stretch…
I installed Debian Stretch today using the January 23 weekly netinstall image. I installed to a VirtualBox guest (the host is Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha). The install went well except for two issues. 1. I chose to install the GNOME desktop. tasksel had some kind of error near the end of downloading packages. Maybe some transient network error. When I re-ran the task, it suggested I install some virtualbox-ose-something package. The install completed successfully. 2. When I rebooted after install, gdm did not start and my console was flickering really bad. Along with the console flickering, I could not reliably enter my password since keypresses were getting dropped. I tried booting into recovery mode but since I did not set a root password (I prefer to use sudo), Debian gave me an error about the root account being locked and after I pressed Enter as prompted, it continued a normal boot. After about 5 minutes, the flickering stopped. I guess this is systemd eagerly retrying a failed service until it reaches its timeout. journalctl -xb revealed that gdm ""could not find drm kms device". I couldn't find anything useful by searching for that message on Google. I then checked to see whether the VirtualBox guest utils were installed. They weren't. So I had to enable unstable in my apt sources, then sudo apt -t unstable install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11 sudo reboot gdm works great now. Suggestions ========= 3. Something needs to be done about whatever in the installer suggests installing the virtualbox-ose package. Since I clicked OK, I thought it *did* install something useful for VirtualBox but I don't think it did. 4. I have not had the #2 problem with other distros. Ubuntu includes some minimal VirtualBox-compatible driver as part of its default kernel. Could Debian do the same so that Debian will actually run on VirtualBox? 5. As far as the drivers go, if they aren't in a Debian release, then once someone actually gets Debian running, I guess they'll either just keep whatever drivers they installed the first time. Or maybe they'll use VirtualBox's guest additions iso to install the drivers. Neither way offers automatic update of drivers. I feel this situation is worse from a security perspective than having a Debian package that is at least updated on major new Debian releases. Why can't the Security Team treat VirtualBox like how it's been treating WebKit1? Still have it in the archives but with a prominent notice that Debian does not provide security updates. 6. Assuming that VirtualBox won't be in the next stable Debian release, I guess we need a page like mozilla.debian.net for it? Thanks, Jeremy Bicha
