VirtualBox is now my defacto development environment for websites. I came across the VirtualBox feature Shared Folders and thought I would give it a try, and see if it was any better or different from using Samba or just plain old FTP for file copies.
Easier said than done…….
Everytime I tried to install the GuestAdditions from the VirtualBox ISO file I got the following message from the install script:
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules ...fail!
Heres how I resolved the problem. Remember however that this solution is for Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and that your system may be configured differently.
First update your system using:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Guest additions needs some dev tools to help build the Kernel which I found were missing from my server install (namely dkms gcc and make):-
sudo apt-get install dkms gcc make
Once I installed these and restarted the system everything built perfectly.
Another thing you might have a problem with is not having the build and kernel headers installed, so you might want to try updating them:-
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
If you get totally stuck a good place to start is the install log which is at /var/log/vboxadd-install.log
Happy virtualising!!
