[ale] botched install of Virtual Box

[Jim Popovitch]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 19:35 -0500, Jim Philips wrote:
> I keep trying to install Virtual Box on my Kubuntu setup with a custom kernel. 
> It gets through the step where it builds the vboxdrv. But I get an error from 
> dmesg:
> 
> vboxdrv: Trying to deactivate NMI watchdog permanently...
> vboxdrv: NMI watchdog either active or at least initialized. Please disable 
> the NMI
> vboxdrv: watchdog by specifying 'nmi_watchdog=0' at kernel command line.
> 
> I googled and found some really interesting discussions about NMI watchdog on 
> the kernel mailing list (Linus is against it). But I didn't find anything 
> that would tell me what to do about it here. Any ideas?

I don't think you'll have any problems trying it.  Just reboot and
press the shift key during boot to access the Grub menu.  Press "e" to
edit the highlighted boot line, on the next screen scroll down to the
2nd or 3rd line (should begin with something like
"kernel /boot/vmlinux..."), press "e" to edit that line and append 
 " nmi_watchdog=0" to the end of it, then press ENTER to accept the
changes and "b" to continue booting into linux (IIRC). ;-)

If those changes work, then you can make them permanent by
editing /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Best wishes,

-Jim P.