Installing the VirtualBox guest additions for Linux

If your host OS is Windows with a Linux flavor as a guest OS, here is a quick reminder of the steps to proceed to install or update the current VirtualBox guest additions.

The VirtualBox guest additions are located in the VBoxGuestAdditions ISO image which can be found in C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox

To install  them, load this ISO image into your virtual CD/DVD drive and your OS guest should make it available through a mount point. Make a local copy of its content into a folder and launch the following command as root :

root@localhost:~#./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 4.1.22 Guest Additions for Linux………
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
Removing installed version 4.1.16 of VirtualBox Guest Additions…
Removing existing VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules …done.
Removing existing VirtualBox non-DKMS kernel modules …done.
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules …done.
Doing non-kernel setup of the Guest Additions …done.
You should restart your guest to make sure the new modules are actually used

Installing the Window System drivers
Installing X.Org Server 1.7 modules …done.
Setting up the Window System to use the Guest Additions …done.
You may need to restart the hal service and the Window System (or just restart
the guest system) to enable the Guest Additions.

Installing graphics libraries and desktop services components …done.

Three services should be present in /etc/init.d :

/etc/init.d/vboxadd
/etc/init.d/vboxadd-x11
/etc/init.d/vboxadd-service

After the install/upgrade of VirtualBox guest additions, reboot your guest OS to make the upgrade take effect.

For more information : Installing VirtualBox guest additions

VirtualBox 4.1.22 released on 2012-09-07

Oracle has released the latest maintenance version of VirtualBox Please find below the details of the changelog :

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed a potential host crash triggered by shutting down a VM when another VM was running (only affected 32-bit hosts and 64-bit OS X hosts, 4.1 regression, bug #9897)
• VMM: fixed a potential host crash under a high guest memory pressure (seen with Windows 8 guests)
• VMM: respect RAM preallocation while restoring saved state.
• VMM: fixed handling of task gates if VT-x/AMD-V is disabled
• Storage: fixed audio CD passthrough for certain media players
• USB: don’t crash if a USB device is plugged or unplugged when saving or loading the VM state (SMP guests only)
• RTC: fixed a potential corruption of CMOS bank 1
• Mac OS X hosts: installer fixes for Leopard (4.1.20 regression)
• Windows Additions: fixed memory leak in VBoxTray (bug #10808)

 

VirtualBox 4.1.20 released on 2012-08-20

Oracle has released the latest maintenance version of VirtualBox Please find below the details of the changelog :

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed a crash under rare circumstances for VMs running without hardware virtualization
• VMM: fixed a code analysis bug for certain displacement instructions for VMs running without hardware virtualization
• VMM: fixed an interpretion bug for TPR read instructions under rare conditions (AMD-V only)
• Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bugs #9604, #10491)
• VBoxSVC: be more tolerant against environment variables with strange encodings (bug #8780)
• VGA: fixed wrong access check which might cause a crash under certain conditions
• NAT: final fix for crashes under rare conditions (bug #10513)
• Virtio-net: fixed the problem with receiving of GSO packets in Windows XP guests causing packet loss in host-to-VM transfers
• HPET: several fixes (bugs #10170, #10306)
• Clipboard: disable the clipboard by default for new VMs
• BIOS: the PCI BIOS was not properly detected with the chipset type set to ICH9 (bugs #9301, #10327)
• Mac OS X hosts: adaptions to Mountain Lion
• Linux Installer: fixes for Gentoo Linux (bug #10642)
• Linux guests: fixed mouse integration on Fedora 17 guests (bug #2306)
• Linux Additions: compile fixes for RHEL/CentOS 6.3 (bug #10756)
• Linux Additions: compile fixes for Linux 3.5-rc1 and Linux 3.6-rc1 (bug #10709)
• Solaris host: fixed a guru meditation while allocating large pages (bug #10600)
• Solaris host: fixed possible kernel panics while freeing memory
• Solaris Installer: fixed missing icon for menu and desktop shortcuts

To install it on Linux, whatever your distro:

VirtualBox on Linux

PhpVirtualBox

If VirtualBox is your solution for virtualization, you should install and have a try with PhpVirtualBox. VirtualBox instances can be managed through a web interface. Most of the functions in the GUI are enabled here.

PhpVirtualBox official website

Before deploying it :

Install a web server

And now put PhpVirtualBox in your webserver :

How to install it

Do not forget to start vboxwebsrv otherwise you will not be able to connect to the web interface :

Enjoy !

VirtualBox 4.0.8 released on 2011-05-16

Oracle released a new version of VirtualBox a few days ago.

Please find below all the fixes applied and all new features added :

• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with recent Mac OS X versions in 64-bit mode (bug #8474)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with hosts with more than 16 cores (bug #8389)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed painting corruptions on a second monitor in 64-bit mode (bug … (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7606″>#7606)
• GUI: restored functionality to set an empty host key to disallow any host key combination (4.0.6 regression; bug Fixed in SVN (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8793″>#8793)
• VBoxManage: added controlvm screenshotpng subcommand for saving the screenshot of a running VM in PNG format
• VBoxHeadless: fixed potential crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• NAT: built-in services use the correct Ethernet addresses in Ethernet header and in ARP requests
• Host-only networking: fixed adapter reference counting
• E1000: fixed rare guest crashes with Linux SMP guests (bug Fixed in SVN (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8755″>#8755)
• SATA: fixed guest disk corruption under rare circumstances (only relevant for guests with more than 2GB RAM; bug Fixed in SVN (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8826″>#8826)
• Storage: fixed data corruption after a snapshot was taken with asynchronous I/O enabled (bug #8498)
• Floppy: several improvement
• HPET: another fix for time jumps (bug Fixed … (closed)” href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8707″>#8707)
• USB: removed assumption that string descriptors are null-terminated (Windows hosts only)
• 3D support: fixed a potential crash when resizing the guest window
• 3D support: fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15
• Snapshots: fixed another bug which could lose entries in the media registry when restoring a snapshot (bug #8363)
• Shared Folders: don’t stop mounting the other valid folders if one host folder is inaccessible (4.0.6 regression)
• Linux Additions: check whether gcc and make are installed before building kernel modules (bug #8795)
• Solaris Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.10
• Guest Additions: fixed inappropriate Guest Additions update notification when using vendor-specific version suffixes (bug #8844)

For more information for installing it :

Download VirtualBox 4.0.8

All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu, it will be ignored in a future release

It seems to be impossible to run kvm-based virtualization program and VirtualBox at the same time. There is some kind of a conflict between both programs. To make sure that a VirtualBox-based virtual machine is launched successfully, I have found a workaround. I temporarily removed all kvm modules :

root@localhost:~# lsmod |grep kvm

kvm_intel              32832  0
kvm                   182683  1 kvm_intel

root@localhost:~#modprobe -r kvm_intel
WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu, it will be ignored in a future release.

Which package does  /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu file belong to ?

root@localhost:~#dpkg -S /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu
kqemu-common: /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu

All the files in /etc/modprobe.d/ ends with .conf except kqemu. Looking at the BTS Debian, here what I found :

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/kqemu-common

This package, kqemu-common, remained on my system after upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. To avoid any error message as indicated below, you can either rename the file as follows :

root@localhost:~# mv /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu.conf

or you can remove the package safely. The modules kvm and kvm_intel remain loaded and the file /etc/modprobe.d/kqemu.conf freshly renamed is still there.

VirtualBox 4.0 available since the 22th of December

The software development of VirtualBox is growing fast and new releases are available more often than in the past. It is about to be the most used virtualization solution at the desktop level. As a reminder for those who are still running VirtualBox with an older version (3.x), VirtualBox 4.0 is available since the 22th Of December 2010. It is a major release.

Here are the new features added :

• Reorganization of VirtualBox into a base package and Extension Packs; see chapter 1.5, Installing VirtualBox and extension packs, see the manual for more information
• New settings/disk file layout for VM portability; see chapter 10.1, Where VirtualBox stores its files, see the manual for more information
• Major rework of the GUI (now called “VirtualBox Manager”):
  • Redesigned user interface with guest window preview (also for screenshots)
  • New “scale” display mode with scaled guest display; see chapter 1.8.5, Resizing the machine’s window, see the manual for more information
  • Support for creating and starting .vbox desktop shortcuts (bug #1889)
  • The VM list is now sortable
  • Machines can now be deleted easily without a trace including snapshots and saved states, and optionally including attached disk images (bug #5511; also, VBoxManage unregistervm –delete can do the same now)
  • Built-in creation of desktop file shortcuts to start VMs on double click (bug #2322)
• VMM: support more than 1.5/2 GB guest RAM on 32-bit hosts
• New virtual hardware:
  • Intel ICH9 chipset with three PCI buses, PCI Express and Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI); see chapter 3.4.1, “Motherboard” tab, see the manual for more information
  • Intel HD Audio, for better support of modern guest operating systems (e.g. 64-bit Windows; bug #2785)
• Improvements to OVF support (see chapter 1.12, Importing and exporting virtual machines, see the manual for more information):
  • Open Virtualization Format Archive (OVA) support
  • Significant performance improvements during export and import
  • Creation of the manifest file on export is optional now
  • Imported disks can have formats other than VMDK
• Resource control: added support for limiting a VM’s CPU time and IO bandwidth; see chapter 5.8, Limiting bandwidth for disk images, see the manual for more information
• Storage: support asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels images
• Storage: support for resizing VDI and VHD images; see chapter 8.21, VBoxManage modifyhd, see the manual for more information.
• Guest Additions: support for multiple virtual screens in Linux and Solaris guests using X.Org server 1.3 and later
• Language bindings: uniform Java bindings for both local (COM/XPCOM) and remote (SOAP) invocation APIs

Please find the complete changelog for this version : Changelog for version 4.0

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.12 available within the Oracle official repository

Oracle issued the latest stable version of Virtualbox 3.2.12 on the 30th of November.
To install it :

root@localhost:~# apt-get install virtualbox-3.2
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
virtualbox-3.2
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 49.2MB of archives.
After this operation, 97.3MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://download.virtualbox.org lenny/non-free virtualbox-3.2 3.2.12-68302~Debian~lenny [49.2MB]
Fetched 49.2MB in 7min8s (115kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages …
Selecting previously deselected package virtualbox-3.2.
(Reading database … 174756 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking virtualbox-3.2 (from …/virtualbox-3.2_3.2.12-68302~Debian~lenny_i386.deb) …
Setting up virtualbox-3.2 (3.2.12-68302~Debian~lenny) …
addgroup: The group `vboxusers’ already exists as a system group. Exiting.
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules:done..
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules:done..
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS:done..
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules:done..

More details about this new release :
Changelog for Virtualbox 3.2.12

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.10 available within the Oracle official repository

Virtualbox OSE 3.2.10 is available from the Oracle official repository. If the previous version is already installed (3.2.8), run the following commands before upgrading :

root@localhost:~#dpkg -l|grep virtualbox-3.2
ii  virtualbox-3.2                          3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny       Oracle VM VirtualBox

root@localhost:~# apt-cache policy virtualbox-3.2
virtualbox-3.2:
Installed: 3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny
Candidate: 3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny
Version table:
3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny 0
500 http://download.virtualbox.org lenny/non-free Packages
*** 3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny 0
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

To install the latest version of Virtualbox :

root@localhost:~# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

You should the lines below during the upgrade process :

Preparing to replace virtualbox-3.2 3.2.8-64453~Debian~lenny (using …/virtualbox-3.2_3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny_i386.deb) …
Stopping VirtualBox kernel module:done..
Unpacking replacement virtualbox-3.2 …
Setting up virtualbox-3.2 (3.2.10-66523~Debian~lenny) …
Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/vboxdrv …
addgroup: The group `vboxusers’ already exists as a system group. Exiting.
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules:done..
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules:done..
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS:done..
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules:done..

For more information about the new features and fixes added :

Official Virtualbox changelog

VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).

If you use qemu and virtualbox on the same machine, you may encounter the following error :

VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).

With this message, you will be unable to run any virtual machine within Virtualbox. The root cause is either the kvm-intel or kvm-amd module  has been loaded at boot time. To remove it for your current session  :

root@localhost:~# lsmod |grep kvm
kvm_intel              32832  0
kvm                   182683  1 kvm_intel

root@localhost:~# modprobe -r kvm_intel

No more message like the one above will be displayed.