Mint 11 and Guest Additions

[robertschmitzberlin]

Hi! I am running VBox 4.0.4 on a Windows 7x64 machine. I have several guest OSes which work perfectly, like Linux Mint 9, Linux Mint 10 and Ubuntu 11.04 (all 32bit systems). My Ubuntu 11.04 guest does even use the Unity desktop. I am not a noob, but I am not really familiar with the interior workings of Linux systems, either.

I have created a new guest with Linux Mint 11 "Katya", which is based on Ubuntu 11.04, but uses the Gnome desktop.
But I am unable to make the Guest Additions work and wonder if anyone here has an idea what's wrong.

When the live DVD boots, there is a short message on the screen that recommends upgrading the BIOS or to use a certain adress command.

After I had installed the OS in the virtual machine, installing the GA failed because of missing kernel headers. I followed the advice from this post http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 07#p185835 and the next time the message about the missing kernel headers was gone. The GA seemed to install all right, but I was still unable to resize the window, even after a reboot . When I tried to reinstall the GA, LInux Mint 11 crashed, not to a reboot, but it ended my login session.

I have activated 3D graphics acceleration, the VM has 1024 MB RAM and 128 MB graphics RAM.

Anybody has any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
R

[Perryg]

I would upgrade to VirtualBox 4.0.8 and try again since Ubuntu 11.04 came out after 4.0.4.

[robertschmitzberlin]

Thank you for the suggestion. However, I also use Bitbox, a hardened Debian with Firefox for super-secure browsing (according to the German government) which does not support versions higher than 4.0.4. And since I do have a working VM of Ubuntu 11.04 with a working Unity desktop, it is highly unlikely that this upgrade would solve anything.

I think I will to ask the same question at some Linux Mint forum because obviously the distributors of Mint have changed something against Ubuntu 11.04.

[Perryg]

I think you may find that running the base of VirtualBox with the guest additions from Ubuntu may be the issue. Since you are running Win 7 I believe that you are running the VBox release unless you have compiled it yourself from source code. VBox did not support the Unity 3D DT without the 4.0.8 guest additions natively so I must assume that you have installed the distro GAs. Anyway best of luck to you and hopefully your issues will be resolved.

[robertschmitzberlin]

@Perryg I may be stubborn, but I am not completely hopeless. You were correct, Perry, I installed VB 4.0.8 and GA v4.0.8 in Katya and it worked just fine. Thank you for giving the right advice.

[robertschmitzberlin]

And, by the way, when they say that Bitbox only works with VB 4.0.4 - they're lying. Or maybe they're just too stupid or too timid to try.

This is posted from within Bitbox (http://www.sirrix.com/content/news/59997.htm) running in VB 4.0.8, working just fine, including GA.