Guest Additions Deb Packages

[passerby]

Could you please consider providing the guest additions as a deb package made available from your repo?

I'd like this because I want to be able to use the features provided by the guest additions in a livecd environment. The way things are, it's not possible to install the additions in that environment because the installation requires a reboot to take effect.

Or could you address the problem in some other way?

[Michael Thayer]

This is on our list of things to do, but unfortunately its (relative) priority is quite low. The reboot after installing the additions is not required strictly speaking (you can start the vboxadd, vboxvfs and vboxadd-timeserv services and restart X11 to make it load the new drivers), but we ask the user to do that for the sake of simplicity. Particularly after upgrading the additions things can get complicated otherwise.

[passerby]

Thanks. It looks simple enough for me to script an easy solution.

[Ken Arnold]

I'd like to second the request for Debian packages. Having to reboot is fine, but having packages would make VM installation and maintenance a lot more straightforward.

[Daniel Serodio]

I think this bug may be closed, see ​http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=virtualbox-guest-additions

[Ken Arnold]

Unfortunately, the virtualbox-guest-additions package is only an ISO image containing the guest additions, meant to be installed on the host so that it can provide that image to guests. What this ticket actually requests is a package that could be installed on guests that could keep guests updated using the same mechanism as normal distribution updates.

(This issue would be mostly resolved if/when paravirtual drivers become standardized and integrated into the kernel. There's some work towards that AFAIK, but it doesn't look too close. And old guest kernels will still need to be supported for years to come, so no packaging effort here will go to waste.)

[Frank Mehnert]

We can't provide these .deb packages, too much effort. The major Linux distributions already provide guest additions.

[adrelanos]

Many years have passed since. Could you please kindly reconsider? Reasons...

The major Linux distributions already provide guest additions.

VirtualBox guest additions ​package is no longer available in the current stable version of Debian (currently: buster). Neither in backports (currently: buster-backports). And that won't change either.

​quote:

Virtualbox is not available in Debian 10 (nor in backports). The reasons are discussed at length in ​https://bugs.debian.org/794466 and various other mailing list threads, but can be summarized as:

• Virtualbox is not suitable for Debian stable releases because of the lack of cooperation of Oracle on security support (that’s the Debian security team decision).
• Since it is not suitable for stable releases, it cannot be included in the testing suite (that’s the Debian release team decision).
• It also cannot be included in official backports, as packages must be in testing before they get backported (that’s the Debian backports team’s decision).

Installing VirtualBox (or guest additions) from Debian unstable (sid) even with APT pinning is a bad idea since that pulls a lot other unrelated packages (such as glibc) which can make the system unstable.

We can't provide these .deb packages, too much effort.

Maybe easier nowadays?

Oracle is already providing Debian packages for VirtualBox host software ​here. Maybe that wasn't the case 9 years ago?

VirtualBox guest additions are missing there.

I've successfully downloaded the VirtualBox source package from Debian unstable (sid), installed VirtualBox build dependencies from Debian stable (currently: buster) and then compiled all VirtualBox packages (VirtualBox host software and VirtualBox guest additions) using dpkg-buildpackage --no-sign. Looks like a reasonably easy process or is something missing?

I guess you already have an internal build script to populate the ​deb repository. Since the packaging (/debian folder) is already done and stabilized, perhaps it wouldn't be much effort to build and upload VirtualBox guest additions too?