ubuntu 9.10 Host + ubuntu 9.10 Guest = faulty console

[ZioNemo]

I installed ubuntu 9.10 "karmic" amd64 beta on a brand new Zotac ION - Atom 330 motherboard. It seems to work pretty well. I made a simple VM (ubuntu client; new virtual disk; all defaults) and tried installing an ubuntu client via netinstall (mini.iso). I could not use the graphical install because of completely garbled video (mainly green horizontal lines). I managed to do a complete install using the terminal mode. Console (both GUI and VBoxHeadless+rdesktop behave in the same way) is not working properly: sometimes the keyboard seems stuck, but it is only(?) missing echo and hitting return sometimes does nothing, but sometimes executes the invisible command, possibly from history.

One application that is consistently failing is aptitude: it starts ok and displays the usual panel, but any keyboard input, including arrows and return, crashes the application with the message:

Uncaught exception: Unable to read from stdin: Success

Everything works perfectly if I log from remote (from the guest) via ssh; also X11 apps work ok via ssh tunnelling.

Only "strange" thing at startup is:

[ 11.627161] piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade BIOS or use force_addr=0xaddr

Regards ZioNemo