Sorry if this kind of question isn’t allowed here, but I’m at my wit’s end. VB randomly started launching on startup about 2 weeks ago (on EndeavourOS) and I can’t figure out why. There’s no shortcut in ~/config/autostart, it isn’t in the KDE startup apps list, and I can’t find anything virtualbox-related with systemctl either. There’s also no setting in the VB app itself. WTF?
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Your viruses installed themselves a Windows virtual machine to run properly?
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/virtualbox-vm-start-on-boot
To successfully automate a VirtualBox VM to start at boot time, we must ensure we’re running VirtualBox version 5 and above.
By default, after installing VirtualBox, the vboxautostart-service unit file should exist in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory.
Alternatively, for systems missing the vboxautostart service, we can create a custom systemd unit file that will contain our configurations to run VirtualBox on boot. systemd is a system and service manager for most Linux-based OSes.
Didn’t see you mention the autostart-service, and the article is recent enough that maybe it was added as part of an update?
vboxautostart.service does not exist
Anything in /etc/systemd/system as vboxautostart?
Anything in /etc/default/ virtualbox file?
No to both!
It’s not a VB problem. I have the same issue with other programs too in Endeveaour OS. It appears that when you turn off the machine sometime a program get “stuck” and will keep auto starting itself without reason. The first time it happened to me it went away after an update, but now I’m having Firefox and Strawberry starting themselves just because they feel it.
My hypothesis is that if you shutdown the machine without closing a program it gets stuck. How to get rid of it? I still have no idea
Interesting… Do you also use KDE?
Yep!
Try to exclude it from being restored on KDE startup. There could be something running in the background that keeps getting saved and restored. Go to System Settings, System, Desktop Session, put virtualbox in the ignored applications list. You can also just choose “Start with an empty session” and then relog to see if that stops it from coming back, then you’ll know if this is causing your problem or not. Good luck!
I was feeling good about this one, but that didn’t work either.
Bummer! What’s its parent process? Maybe that will hint at something.
I’m not sure what you mean by this, sorry! My Linux expertise is limited once I get below surface level.
Well hey, welcome to the Linux club :)
Unlike Windows, in Linux every process has a parent except for PID (Process ID) 1, which is the init system. You can run a command like
ps auxfand you’ll get a tree of all your processes and you can hopefully see what spawned VirtualBox.
Looks like you need to change the session restore settings in KDE. It’s the virtual box GUI that starts up?
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/plasma-desktop/kcontrol/kcmsmserver/index.html
No hablo espanol, but this seems to be telling me how to install virt-manager, which is not what I’m tying to do.
