WIN goes to nixternal for pointing out a fix regarding the VirtualBox guest additions installation on Ubuntu 9.04. Just the other day I installed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” alpha 6 release and then installed guest additions on the virtual machine. At that point things went downhill. I was no longer able to get a graphical session other than “Safe Mode” which, as we all know, isn’t the best. I had not had time to figure out how to work around it–I honestly tossed it up to a bug in an alpha release–but then nixternal pointed out the fix on his blog. Again, thanks.
The Workaround
If you’ve attemted to install VirtualBox guest additions within your Ubuntu 9.04 installation and had issues, this workaround should hopefully solve your problems.
- Mount the VirtualBox Guest Additions CD. This is done by clicking “Devices > Install Guest Additions”
- Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and navigate your way to
/media/cdrom/ - Extract the architecture-specific file using the command:
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-XXX.run --target /tmp - Edit the
install.shfile, which should now be sitting in your/tmpdirectory. - Line 415 (in vim type :415 to jump directly), needs to be changed to:
1.5.99.* | 1.6.0) - Run:
sudo ./install.sh - Reboot
It appears that an upstream patch would be *very* simple, so hopefully this gets fixed before it bites too many people. In the meantime, I hope this helps anyone that got stuck like I did.
Doesn’t look like 1.6 is present at all in the current version of Ubuntus repositories.
This happened to me too a few days ago. Without reading your post, I still wouldn’t know were the safe mode came from. Being a regular user, I wasn’t able to diagnose the problem. Thanks 🙂
Which version of VirtualBox are you using? I haven’t had a problem loading Jaunty in Virtualbox since alpha 3 or 4. It “just worked” because they added support for the newest X (I thought).
@Jonathan – I’m using VirtualBox 2.1.4-2 from the virtualbox site (not the -ose version).
Good idea. Thanks