Most of the time, the Fedora upgrades or fresh installs that we’ve performed over the years have been pretty smooth. Most of the time. Sometimes however, after installing Fedora (not version specific) you’ll run into the relatively vague error that states the following:
“Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. Please contact a system administrator”
What Triggers the Something has gone wrong Error with VirtualBox?
There are a number of variables which can cause your Fedora system to crash and display the vague Something has gone wrong error. And, since the system becomes completely unresponsive in these situations, it’s practically impossible to check the logs to figure out what is happening. Thankfully, the cause is fairly easy to troubleshoot and figure out.
In my experience I have only ever seen this error when installing Fedora as a virtual machine instance in Virtual Box and 99.8% of the time, the reasons for triggering the Something has gone wrong error have been due to the amount of resources allocated to your virtual machine. For example:
a) Not enough RAM
b) Not enough CPU
c) Not enough disk space
Sounds simple enough, right? It is, so read on.
Solution: How to Fix the Something has gone wrong error
Open VirtualBox Manager and look at the Settings for the virtual machine instance in question. As mentioned above, verify that you’ve allocated enough RAM, disk space and CPU. Recent version of Fedora Workstation require 20G of disk space and at minimum, 4G of RAM. I’d recommend at least 6G of RAM and 2 CPUs. You can tweak your settings as you go to gauge performance but I can 99.9% guarantee that you will eliminate the aforementioned error if you give your virtual machine the correct amount of resources.