Linux Guest Additions must be reinstalled after Ubuntu software update

[nightware]

After almost any Ubuntu software update via the package manager the Linux Guest Additions must be reinstalled to work properly. This should not be.

I am not into it, but I guess it is because the code of the Guest additions is not incorporated in the update program. But it kind of annoys always having to reinstall the guest additions after updating Ubuntu.

[nightware]

I Forgot to Mention the Ubuntu distribution Ubuntu 8.04 LTS And had been the same with Ubuntu 7.10

[Michael Thayer]

We are aware of this issue, and it will probably be fixed at some point, most likely by adding native additions packages at least for Ubuntu and possibly others. Unfortunately this is not likely to happen in the near future, as there are too many other, higher priority tasks to be done.

[Frank Mehnert]

Actually installing the dkms package should solve the problem for you. Install the guest additions once more after you installed dkms. On next kernel upgrade, the guest kernel modules will be recompiled automatically.

This will not work for Ubuntu 8.10 because the current dkms mechanism fails on that distribution (because it uses Linux >= 2.6.27, and there are dependencies between the two VirtualBox guest kernel modules) but we hope that we can fix this with the next release. But as you are running Ubuntu 8.04, dkms should work fine for you.

[Frank Mehnert]

The dependency problem was fixed some releases ago (2.1.0 IIRC). Please check the latest release 2.2.2 and install the proper guest additions.

[Teoh Han Hui]

How is this "fixed"?

Using VirtualBox 3.1.2 r56127 with Ubuntu 9.10 guest, I still need to manually reinstall the VirtualBox Guest Additions after a kernel upgrade. The user is left wondering what has happened if he/she has not read the recommendation about installing dkms in the manual.

What about performing dkms installation in the bash script? Or at least make this recommendation more obvious to the end user.

[Frank Mehnert]

If DKMS is installed, the kernel upgrade works fine. If the user forgot to install the DKMS kernel when the guest additions are installed, then calling /etc/init.d/vboxadd setup after installing the DKMS package fixes the problem as well.

And no, we will not install DKMS by default.