It is common for IT companies (at least in Germany, automotive field) to use Ubuntu Linux LTS in a VirtualBox on Windows or Mac hosts. This way the employee can use Microsoft Outlook / Office, Microsoft Skype, Cisco Spark, or other proprietary collaboration tools, and at the same time use the supplied virtual machine for development.
By default VirtualBox doesn’t configure any 3D acceleration or multi-core CPU for the guest.
One needs to change these settings in order to have a more responsive desktop environment
and to compile faster Also important not to forget about the installation of the VirtualBox
Guest Additions.
Running glxinfo
on a Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS in VirtualBox 5.1.18 gives back this information:
OpenGL vendor string: Humper OpenGL renderer string: Chromium OpenGL version string: 2.1 Chromium 1.9 OpenGL shading language version string: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
As it turns out this is not enough to run Qt Creator 4.2.1. Qt Creator simply displays a black welcome screen on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS, or simply crash on Ubuntu 14.04 / 12.04 LTS:
If Qt Creator is run from command line, it will give out these messages (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS):
QOpenGLFramebufferObject: Unsupported framebuffer format. QOpenGLFramebufferObject: Unsupported framebuffer format.
If you do a web search after “Qt Creator VirtualBox crash” you will find out how to fix this problem – either disabling the welcome plug-in, or disable the 3D acceleration of your VirtualBox.
Disabling the 3D acceleration means that the system will use a software OpenGL driver.
But then again why not simply use a software OpenGL driver just for Qt Creator and not for the whole system?