Upgrading to 10alpha

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Fri Aug 8 00:24:53 UTC 2008


Scott Robbins wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 03:06:05PM +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
>> Scott Robbins wrote:
>>
>>
>> I have to say I'm impressed with VirtualBox:-(
>>
>> I downloaded it on my CentOS5 system , and then
>> rpm -ivh ...
>> and too a brief comfort break.
>> Came back to see the grub menu vanish as the system began booting.
>>
>> VirtualBox didn't start. A quick investigation showed no kernel module and no 
>> magic kernel builder package (not mentioned as a prereq??).
>> "make && make install" in the right directory got the module.
> 
> Great software, poor documentation, especially for RH based systems.  
> 
> If you're not yet disgusted with it, would you please try again after
> doing
> 
> yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ make kernel-devel
> 
> Like many things, it does require the basic build tools.  (I've found
> that the above will almost always pull in everything else I need as
> deps, e.g., kernel-headers.  


I had a fairly complete set of development tools already present, this 
is the system I was building kernels on a while back to see why the .25 
kernels couldn't find the disk drives, and I also contemplated building 
the libvirt stuff from source (until I found how shocking the code was).


I suspect the problem _might_ be related to the fact that I booted with 
xen. After I posted, I booted non-xen and tried to build the kernel mod. 
I discovered I needed something more, and hit on kernel-devel. Still it 
complained. Someone just released a new kernel, so I had the "wrong" 
kernel-devel. Installed upgrades and booted new kernel and it builds 
okay. I eventually got round the problems with devices permissions etc, 
then found it didn't want to boot my 64-bit SLES DVD. (I'm running 64bit 
Linux, don't have/want to install i386 libraries). Also, I don't like 
registering and I don't like being nagged.

"Failed to initialize Host interface networking" wasn't encouraging 
either. As a workaround, and after getting hits with google, I settled 
for another choice.

So, I thought to try building the fsf-free version from source. The 
extra bits I see in the closed-source version don't seem all that 
important, I don't currently need to share USB or serial ports.

I found the build requirements a little dispiriting.



> 
> I should put up a quick start guide, and probably will at some point.
> 
> After adding the above programs, if your user name is john, as root or
> with root privilege
> gpasswd -a john vboxusers
vigr works well.
> 
> Log out completely as john, log back in, make sure you're a member of
> vboxusers. 
> 
> service vboxdrv setup

I found that, after I did it the generic way. Whether it works without 
dkms I've not investigated.

> 
> This will take a little while, but even with a relatively slow box,
> probably less than 3 minutes.  You should see that it completed
> successfully, making it unnecessary to do a modprobe.  It will probably
> add the vboxdrv to automatically start upon boot--if that's OK, fine, if
> not then fix it with chkconfig or your tool of choice. 
> 
> By default, like qemu, it uses NAT networking. If that's OK for your
> needs, well and good, if you want it to be a separate host on the LAN, I
> have a page on that part of it, at
> http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/vboxbridge.html since their docs

I'll try to remember that, it looks good:-)

> for bridging in Fedora were incomplete last time I looked. 
> 
> 
>> modprobe ...
>> Instant panic, system reboots.
>> Defaults to same kernel, panics and reboots....
> 
> I've never run into that with it, especially on CentOS. 
> With CentOS, it's always been a pretty smooth install.

I have a knack for breaking things.


> 
> 


-- 

Cheers
John

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