Rubenerd

Fedora and I have a long and colourful history with screen issues. This is the latest chapter, today dealing with installing guest additions.

These are the dependencies:

$ sudo dnf -y install gcc automake make kernel-devel kernel-headers perl

Then you can run:

$ cd /var/run/media/[USER]/VBOXADDITIONS_[VER]
$ sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
==> vboxadd.sh: Building Guest Additions kernel modules.
==> Failed to set up service vboxadd, please check the log file
==> /var/log/VBoxGuestAdditions.log for details.

Welp, that didn’t work. Checking the logs:

==> vboxadd.sh: failed: Please check that you have gcc, make,
==> the header files for your Linux kernel and possibly perl
==> installed

Maybe the kernel version and sources weren’t the same. To be sure:

$ sudo dnf install kernel*
$ sudo shutdown -r now
$ sudo dnf --best --allowerasing [above packages]

Done. So let’s try again.

$ cd /var/run/media/[USER]/VBOXADDITIONS_[VER]/
$ sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
==> vboxadd.sh: Building Guest Additions kernel modules.
==> Failed to set up service vboxadd, please check the log file
==> /var/log/VBoxGuestAdditions.log for details.

Welp, that didn’t work. On the VirtualBox issue tracker:

guest additions do not build with 4.8 kernel.
Got an error message while attempting to install guest additions in a Fedora Rawhide guest for the 4.8.0-0.rc0.git2.1.fc26.x86_64 kernel (worked with the last 4.7 kernel).

The solution:

The problem appears to be gone with VirtualBox 5.1.6. When installing the latest kernel in my Rawhide guest, the error does not occur.

This looks encouraging. What’s my VirtualBox version?

VirtualBox Graphical User Interface
Version 5.1.14

Welp, maybe it’s a regression?

% brew cask remove virtualbox virtualbox-extension-pack
% brew update
% brew install virtualbox virtualbox-extension-pack

Looks encouraging, much newer version.

==> Downloading [..] VirtualBox-5.1.22-115126-OSX.dmg
==> 🍺  virtualbox was successfully installed!

Let’s start it up and try again in this Fedora guest.

==> Uncompressing VirtualBox 5.1.22 Guest Additions for Linux...........
==> VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
==> Removing installed version 5.1.14 of VirtualBox Guest Additions...
==> Copying additional installer modules ...
==> Installing additional modules ...
==> vboxadd.sh: Starting the VirtualBox Guest Additions.

Phew. The guest still has that [awful screen flicker] when you open a window (and this previously-working hack no longer fixes it), but I’ll take it to get this work done.