modules: distro's vs guest addition's

[socratis]

Is there any real difference between the "Devices"->"Insert Guest Additions CD Image..." you propose and the manual mounting and install ?

Your method is error prone. The Devices, Insert GAs CD is guaranteed to work 100% of the time.

the single menus entries I have are "VirtualBox VM" and "Input", and there, no option to install the GA or even mount the CD.

Go to the VM settings, User Interface. There you can select which menus are shown and which ones are not. If you do not click on the down arrow, but just to the left of it, on the "button" itself, you enable/disable the whole menu. Make sure that the menus are enabled.

If you click on the down arrow you can select individual menu entries that are shown or hidden.

[AALLeeXX]

I tried to purge the Ubunutu Virtual box GA, which seems succeeded, and also uninstall the official one. However, when I try to install the latest official one, I have a message stating:

You appear to have a version of the VirtualBox Guest Additions
on your system which was installed from a different source or using a
different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your
Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly
recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before
installing this version. If this is simply an older or a damaged
installation you may safely proceed.

Do you wish to continue anyway? [yes or no]

Ubuntu is purged of all VB GA, official GA are supposed to be removed and I never installed any other GA than the official ones. But I get this message.
Thus I still wonder how to clean all of this to get a clean setup (that works).
Also, I got this warning since I installed the GA 5.1.6 the first time, but I never got it before, and since, anytime I try an install, I get this warning...

Any hint will be really welcome...
Thanks

[socratis]

Ubuntu is purged of all VB GA

No it is not, otherwise the GA installer wouldn't complain. Not an Ubuntu power user, but I believe if you install the Synaptic package manager it would be showing what package the installer is complaining about.

[AALLeeXX]

Thanks for the hint, I'm far from a power user either, newbie in everything here...
You were right, one package remained installed (unity-scope-virtualbox) - found with synaptic ! I removed it.
I cannot check now if the GA installer still complains, I have a stable environment, need to keep it a while... need to work at other stuffs too. But I will feedback later (at next update).

Thanks for your great support !

Alexandre

[AALLeeXX]

Update: All GA properly cleaned now, reinstalled GA 5.1.6 (without any warning): Same as previously shared in another thread, make no improvement at all. Seems like these GA are corrupted on not effective in my Ubuntu client.

Then to revert to GA 5.1.4, I did:
uninstall of GA 5.1.6
reboot
unstall GA 5.1.4 - got warning as above reported (previous install apparently partly remaining)
reboot
GA effective, usable system...

Another remark is that the GA installation seems often broken or damaged by Ubuntu updates...

Not sure how to deal with all of that but pretty time consumming

[AALLeeXX]

The Devices, Insert GAs CD is guaranteed to work 100% of the time.

I finally found and use the Devices menu ...
Now the Device menu is there as well as the Insert GA CD image... but when I start it, I bump onto an error:

Could not mount the media/drive '/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' (VERR_PDM_MEDIA_LOCKED).

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: ConsoleWrap
Interface: IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed}
Callee: IMachine {b2547866-a0a1-4391-8b86-6952d82efaa0}

What is is supposed to do, just mount the iso image or proceed with the complete installation of the GA ? Is is manual or automatic ?

However, no idea who can lock this iso file .... I checked in the app package and I could find it (I did not know the GA were also in the app package - needless to download separately then ?).

Again the iso file is present and not locked by me... but seems it is for VB...

Any hints ? Could not find any help in the documentation about that.

[socratis]

Could not find any help in the documentation about that.

Maybe not, but using Google/Bing/Whatever and searching for "VERR_PDM_MEDIA_LOCKED site:virtualbox.org", you could find:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=66198
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=27089
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29179

[AALLeeXX]

Indeed, sorry forgot external search engines, but also tried here and got only one reply of no help on my case ...
Thanks anyway, seems to be good now. I'll experiment this at next Linux update now.