But for some reason, the installation reliably freezes at some (variable) point. The last time (I think on the 4th run), the final state shows a progress bar titled “Select and install software” at 1% (see screenshot).

Frozen lenny installation on virtualbox

However, I can still change into another virtual console inside the virtual machine and everything seems to work fine in there. I can create files on the target root partition, read files from the installer CD. Running ps in the machine, the only indicator that something is wrong is that all installer processes are in “stopped” state. On a fully installed machine, I would use tools like strace and gdb to find out what’s going on here, but they are not available inside the installer.

So I’ll go the easy way and create a Xen DomU to test my packages. If somebody has an explanation for this behaviour, I’m all ears…

Software versions used

virtualbox-ose                            3.0.10-dfsg-1
virtualbox-ose-guest-source               3.0.10-dfsg-1
debian-503-i386-netinst.iso