Virtualbox guest additions kill X in Ubuntu (solved)

[Graham Watkins]

On 21/05/13 08:18, Graham Watkins wrote:
> Good day to you.
>
> I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed in Virtualbox which ran OK, if a bit 
> slow, until recently when I did a bunch of updates.  As is usually the 
> case after kernel updates,  I had to reinstall the guest additions to 
> get back full screen and auto-resize.   However, what I got instead 
> when I restarted, was the following message:
>
> "The system is running in low graphics mode
> Your screen, graphics card and input device settings could not be 
> detected correctly.  You will need to configure these yourself"
>
> It then drops into a menu with buttons where most of the options don't 
> seem to work and eventually bring me to a command line login.
> I've tried a complete reinstall followed by an upgrade to 12.10 but 
> again the installation of guest additions bring me to the same point
> If the graphics settings can be configured I'll need some advice on 
> how to go about it
>
> I don't think I can provide log output as cutting/pasting between 
> guest and host no longer functions.
>
> This is Virtualbox 4.2.12.  The kernel is 3.2.0-43-generic-pae i686
>
> Cheers,
>
> Graham Watkins
>
>
Good news - I found this set of instructions on the VirtualBox web forum 
and they have fixed the issue.

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=55146

I'm still having problems getting Guest Additions to work properly but 
at least I have a GUI now.