Impossible to update guest additions on Ubuntu

Discussions about using Linux guests in VirtualBox.
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tdelaune
Posts: 2
Joined: 26. Apr 2021, 15:38

Impossible to update guest additions on Ubuntu

Post by tdelaune »

Hi,

I was running VirtualBox 6.1.18 on Windows 10 to run an Ubuntu 20.04.2.
Guest additions were working very badly (I have been able to make shared clipboard work for a while and then nothing worked) so I try to reinstall them but I had an error.

So I've updated VirtualBox in 6.1.20 and now I have the following error:

Code: Select all

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 6.1.20 Guest Additions for Linux........
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
Removing installed version 6.1.18 of VirtualBox Guest Additions...
Required file filelist not found.  Aborting...
Failed to remove existing installation.  Aborting...
Press Return to close this window...
What's this filelist file? And how can I force guest additions to reinstall?

Thanks for your help
tdelaune
Posts: 2
Joined: 26. Apr 2021, 15:38

Re: Impossible to update guest additions on Ubuntu

Post by tdelaune »

I found that this filelist file is requested by the script /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.18/uninstall.sh and should be in /var/lib/VBoxGuestAdditions/.
But I have no /var/lib/VBoxGuestAdditions/ directory in my vm!

If I comment this line in the uninstall script, I get the following error:
/opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.18/uninstall.sh: 49: .: Can't open /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.18/installer/module-autologon

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for CUR_MODULE in /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.18/installer/module-autologon
    do
        . "$CUR_MODULE"
    done
And again, I have no installer directory:

Code: Select all

~$ ll /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.18/
total 40K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K avril 21 17:31 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K avril 21 17:31 init
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K avril 21 17:31 other
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  13K avril 21 11:21 routines.sh
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K avril 21 17:31 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4,0K janv.  7 17:26 src
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3,0K avril 26 17:19 uninstall.sh
It seems that my old guest additions v.6.1.18 is really broken but I can't see how to reinstall it...
kubon
Posts: 1
Joined: 3. Feb 2022, 09:24

Re: Impossible to update guest additions on Ubuntu

Post by kubon »

Have same case.
In my case the following instructions helped:
sudo mv /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.30/ /home/<userdir>/backup
sudo mv /usr/sbin/vbox-uninstall-guest-additions /home/<userdir>/backup
sudo /media/<userdir>/VBox_GAs_6.1.30/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
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