Kali Linux Starts With Black Screen in VirtualBox

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Background/Problem

A while back I installed Kali Linux [1] as a virtual machine on a Kubuntu [2] system. The exact system information were:

  • Host system: Kubuntu (Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver))
  • VirtualBox: 6.0.14r133895 (Qt5.9.5)
  • Virtual machine: Kali Rolling (2019.4) x64

After installing Kali Linux and starting the virtual machine, all I got was a black screen and a blinking cursor. I couldn’t do anything in that virtual machine. You can find a quite a lot of possible solution to this problem online:

  • Check if virtualization is enabled in the bios.
  • In VirtualBox, un-check the setting “Enable 3D Acceleration”.
  • Increase the “Video Memory” in VirtualBox.

Nothing worked for me.

Solution

After some more searching I finally came across oumolayna’s answer here [3]. And this work for me:

  • When you get the black screen and blinking cursor: press ALT + F2
  • After that you can log in with your root account.
  • Run: “apt-get install --fix-broken”
  • Run: “apt-get update”
  • Run: “apt-get upgrade”
  • Than reboot the virtual machine.

Thanks oumolayna for the help.



Take care,
Andreas


References

  1. O. Security, “Kali Linux | Penetraion Testing and Ethical Hacking Linux Distribution.” [Online]. Available at: https://www.kali.org/. [Accessed: 06-Sep-2020].
  2. kubuntu.org, “Kubuntu | Friendly Computing.” [Online]. Available at: https://kubuntu.org/. [Accessed: 06-Sep-2020].
  3. oumolayna, “[SOLVED] kali linux black screen cursor blinking VBOX,” 30-Jul-2019. [Online]. Available at: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2223833-kali-linux-black-screen-cursor-blinking-vbox. [Accessed: 06-Sep-2020].

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