Chromium on Debian in VirtualBox woes

A while back I discovered that at some point my Chromium inside my Debian VM has stopped working satisfactorily. It ends up drawing black elements everywhere, gets stuck on top, and just generally messes up the entire VM unless you happen to have a shell handly where you can blindly type killall chromium.

I started taking a look at it this morning, as I’m working on a project in my VM and having to access it from Chrome outside the VM, and for some reason my router can’t seem to decide which IP address to give to the VM so I have to keep looking for it (or try multiple potential alternatives).

The first thing I did was install the update VirtualBox has been annoying me about for a few days now, and then do the update of the additions as well. Hampered, as usual, by the fact the autorun doesn’t work on my machine - I suspect it might be because I don’t have sudo installed, so it took a bit to remember that the appropriate response is grabbing root privileges, changing to the /media/cdrom0 directory, and running sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run However, none of that fixed Chromium.

I did discover that if I run chromium --disable-gpu, Chromium runs effectively (after I’d blown away my .config/chromium directory, naturally, as I’d suspected something in there may have been the culprit). However, disabling all the GPU-related things in chrome://flags doesn’t fix it permanently, so I can’t run it from the Gnome UI at the moment.

I’m not sure if I care enough to try and work out what’s wrong.

Horsham, VIC, Australia fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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