Running VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty alpha

I’m using the current Ubuntu alpha – 11.04 as my desktop OS on my laptop, and on the same laptop I sometimes need to run VirtualBox to access an MS-Windows environment.

In the current Natty alpha this doesn’t work well. I have VirtualBox 4.0 installed from Oracle’s repository, but it doesn’t manage to compile the kernel module it needs – probably because of the “RC” nature of the current Natty’s kernel (2.6.38-rc4) as of this writing.

I’ve seen many posts on the internet about running Ubuntu 11.04 as a guest in VirtualBox, but couldn’t find anyone talking about my problem, which is the opposite – running VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.04. So here’s how to get this thing working:

  1. Install VirtualBox 4.0 (from Oracle’s repository)
  2. Install the kernel headers package for Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install linux-headers
  3. Edit the headers’ Makefile to declare the same version as the uname command: run uname -r and note the suffix after the version number, for example mine says “2.6.38-3-generic“, so I am interested in “-3-generic“. Edit the Makefile using sudo gedit /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-3-generic/Makefile , and the fourth line should say something like “EXTRAVERSION = -rc4“. Change the value (in this case “-rc4“) to what you found out from uname.
  4. add autoconf.h to the linux include directory, because it is missing for some reason:
    cd /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-3-generic/include/linux
    sudo ln -s ../generated/autoconf.h

Now you can run sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup and it should complete successfuly and allow you to start VirtualBox.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Posted in Articles, Software | 33 Comments »

Cloning VirtualBox VM Snapshots

This is another “how to” tech article, anyone who is not interested in such things may stop reading now.

VirtualBox is a great virtualization software (hypervisor as the lingo currently goes) – I believe it matches up nicely against the current VMWare Workstation line and they offer both an open source version which is free for any use as well as a commercial version (with some added features such as SATA support) that is free for personal use.

VirtualBox allows you to take snapshots of the current VM state so that you can safely return to a previous state of your VM if you messed something up (for example – installed too much software on your Windows XP VM). Unfortunately, unlike what the VirtualBox UI will have you think, the snapshot features allows you to take progressive snapshots but you can’t fork your snapshot tree – you can’t create branches off old snapshots. Snapshots which are not current can be either discarded (have their state merged into another state) or reverted too (discard all the newest data and return to the old state).
old state

Additionally, you can’t copy (clone) VMs with snapshots except copying the oldest state1.

(more…)

  1. which is most often not what you want. If you don’t mind discarding all of the old snapshots, you can clone the current VMs state using the method described in this VirtualBox forum thread [↩]

Posted in Articles, Software | 9 Comments »