[Solved] debian installation in virtualbox on apple silicon M1

[plumeros]

Dear forum,

I have installed virtualbox 7.1.2 on a apple silicon M1 macbook pro with macos 14.6.1. I would like to install debian 12.7.0-arm64.

I tried the virtualbox unattended install and multiple variations of manual install. The installation always runs well until the virtual machine is re-started. But then the UEFI interactive shell appears and I didn't find any way to start grub and then debian.

In my desperation I tried ubuntu, and this seems to work well. I can create snapshots, re-start them and even install the virtualbox guest additions.

Is this a known issue, or did I overlook anything?

Thanks and kind regards

[juribel]

Have you tried a Debian live system with the Calamares installer?

[plumeros]

No,
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
says:
Architecture: Currently only images for 64-bit PC (amd64) are provided.
Apple silicon has an arm64 architecture.
Is there any live image that supports arm64?

[arzgi]

Is there any live image that supports arm64?

Yes.
https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst.en.html

[plumeros]

I tried these installations, both should support arm64 architectures:
network installation: https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst.en.html -> https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... etinst.iso
and
full DVD installation: https://www.debian.org/CD -> https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... -DVD-1.iso

Both images contain the "normal" installer, but no live system with the Calamares installer.
Unfortunately for now I would not know any live image for the arm64 architecture.

[arzgi]

Did you click the arm64 link from the link I gave?

[plumeros]

Under
https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst.en.html
I can see 3 arm64 links under the following titles:
- Small CDs or USB sticks
- Tiny CDs, flexible USB sticks, etc.
- Network boot
The only one which contains an iso image is the one under "Small CDs or USB sticks".
This is one of the images I tried.

[cjcdev]

Hello, I have the same issue trying to install Debian netinst on VirtualBox 7.1.2 on Apple Silicon.

[cjcdev]

For anyone else having issues, you can refer to this youtube video. VBOX needs a startup script in UEFI, my guess is that by default if there is no script and it will try to boot a grubx64.efi (amd64 architecture). But with apple silicon this should be grubaa64.efi - just my speculation that this is the cause of the bug. Regardless, make the startup.nsh with the correct commands and you should be up and running.

[plumeros]

Hi cjcdev,
yes, this solved the issue. Thanks a lot!