Ubuntu Tutorials

I took some time today to check out Ubuntu 10.10 Beta. So far I’m impressed with some of the improvements, and I’ll blog about those later, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a workaround I came across in getting Guest Additions working when running Ubuntu 10.10 inside VirtualBox.

My first attempt at getting Guest Additions installed was by mounting the CD and running the command:

sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

While this attempted to compile the drivers necessary for Guest Additions, it never seemed to work. After repeated reboots and rebuilds, I could never get a better resolution. After a little searching I came across a solution that seems to take care of the problem.

To install Guest Additions in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta, you’ll need to install a pre-packaged version available through the repositories. You can run the command below, or click on the URL:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11

After a quick reboot you should be set.

I hope you enjoy Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (and forward). It’s the little things like this that make testing it in a virtual machine worthwhile.

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.

1. Mount the VirtualBox Guest Additions CD.  This is done by clicking “Devices > Install Guest Additions”
2. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and navigate your way to /media/cdrom/
3. Extract the architecture-specific file using the command: sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-XXX.run --target /tmp
4. Edit the install.sh file, which should now be sitting in your /tmp directory.
5. Line 415 (in vim type :415 to jump directly), needs to be changed to: 1.5.99.* | 1.6.0 )
6. Run: sudo ./install.sh
7. 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.