SOLVED Extpack "Error creating textual authentication agent"

[tristram]

Trying to install the extension pack (it matches the VB package I'm running), I get the message below, anyone got any ideas how to solve this please?

Failed to install the Extension Pack /home/jim/Downloads/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.2-73507.vbox-extpack.

The installer failed with exit code 127: Error creating textual authentication agent: Error opening current controlling terminal for the process (`/dev/tty'): No such device or address.

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: ExtPackManager
Interface: IExtPackManager {3295e6ce-b051-47b2-9514-2c588bfe7554}

I'm running XFCE on ubuntu 11.04 (server edition)

[Perryg]

Server means no X so you will need to install this as sudo using the VBoxManage CLI. See Chapter 8 VBoxManage. Below is a snip.

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VBoxManage extpack install [--replace] <tarball> |
                   uninstall [--force] <name> |
                   cleanup

I just read you post again and see that you have in fact installed X and DM on a server. You must have missed something, but the CLI will work regardless.

[tristram]

SOLVED:

Thanks for the input. On the 'you are missing something' hint, I looked in synaptic and it has the latest version there. So I removed the VB install that I'd downloaded from the web and used synaptic to install VB... all works well now

[Sasquatch]

Synaptic only has packages that are in the repositories you set up. By default, you only have the Ubuntu repos and they do not have the latest VB version. They are most likely still on 4.0.x, as were the Oracle version you can find on the website is 4.1.2.
You already had VB installed, but now you wanted to install the Extension Pack. That is an add-on, not available in the Ubuntu repos. The error you got when you tried to install the extpack, is something else. You may have well missed something, unless you installed the package "xubuntu-desktop". Other than that, using the command line like Perry suggested should work no matter what. You do have to run the command as root, so switch to root or use sudo.

[arjun2594]

Since you were running a server edition of Ubuntu and installed XFCE on top of it, X server did not run as root. So all its child process (including virtualbox) did not have root privileges (which is required for installing the extension pack). You can either install it using the terminal, or start virtualbox from the terminal prefixing sudo like

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sudo virtualbox

Both ways it should work.