[vbox-dev] Inclusion of the Guest Additions in Ubuntu 11.10 by default

[Michael Thayer]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 14:28 -0500, Perry Halbert wrote:
> Squeeze came with the VirtualBox guest additions pre-installed, I 
> thought wheezy did to but wouldn't bet money on it without installing again.
> So does openSUSE.
> 
> Perhaps that is what Alexey was talking about.
> 
> In any case trying to install the additions from VBox there is a warning 
> to remove the current ones first.
> So there is a mechanism to verify.
We do check for files which look like they belong to the Additions if we
can't find a recognisable Additions installation and print that warning.
From there to knowing how to uninstall a distribution version of the
Additions on a random Linux distribution (although we officially only
support a smallish number we try to keep things as generic as possible
to ensure that the Additions work on most distributions in practice) is
quite a large step.

Regards,

Michael

> On 08/30/2011 01:38 PM, Felix Geyer wrote:
> > On 30.08.2011 18:21, Michael Thayer wrote:
> >> One of the things I am worried about is situations like when the system
> >> has installed some old Additions version and the user installs current
> >> Additions following our instructions, and then the system does some
> >> minor update, partly or fully overwriting our Additions and the end
> >> result is not very pretty.
> > The additions installer could detect if the distribution package is installed
> > and offer to remove it.
> >
> >
> > On 30.08.2011 19:00, Alexey Eromenko wrote:
> >>> Do the other distributions do things like Ubuntu, or do they just
> >>> install the package silently?
> >> openSUSE, Debian and Mandriva just install GA silently. Yes, there is
> >> a potential risk of over-writing new GA by doing minor update. (But so
> >> far heard no complains about this from users)
> > On Debian the guest additions package isn't silently installed.
> > Users need to manually install it.
-- 
ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG   Michael Thayer
Werkstrasse 24                     VirtualBox engineering
71384 Weinstadt, Germany           mailto:michael.thayer at oracle.com

Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München
Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603

Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V.
Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande
Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697
Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz, Marcel van de Molen, Alexander van der Ven