4.2.8 Guest Additions not recognized in Ubuntu 12.10

[Jim Avera]

Guest additions still don't seem to be recognized in Ubuntu 12.10. That is, they seemingly install okay but have no effect. I say "still" because there are several earlier reports about this which have been closed as fixed at this point (note that Ubuntu 12.10 is now the current release which users are offered for download by default).

Symptoms:

• shared folders don't auto mount
• manual mounts always give "/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device"
• screen does not adjust to host's window size
• Devices->Shared Folders pops up a warning saying the guest does not have guest additions installed.

When re-installing GA, a message appears saying the previously-installed GA is first being removed (as expected). So the installer seems to think everything is hunky-dory.

Host: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64-bit with VirtualBox 4.2.8 r83876 Guest: Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit. (both recently updated).

[Jim Avera]

log covering:boot,re-install GA;reboot;Devices->Shared Folders (got error)

[Jim Avera]

This is probably not relevant, but after doing a final shut-down in the guest and waiting for that to happen, and the vbox window to close, VBox.log ended with this:

hanging the VM state from 'DESTROYING' to 'TERMINATED'.
00:01:15.346969 ERROR [COM]: aRC=E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005) aIID={db7ab4ca-2a3f-4183-9243-c1208da92392} aComponent={Console} aText={The virtual machine is being powered down}, preserve=false

[Frank Mehnert]

The Additions are supposed to work fine with Ubuntu 12.10 and mounting shared folders works here as well. Please provide some more information from your guest:

• attach the file /var/log/vboxadd-install.log
• post the output of

  /sbin/lsmod|grep vbox
  

• post the output of

  ps aux|grep VBox
  

• post the output of

  sudo VBoxControl sharedfolder list
  

[Jim Avera]

/var/log/vboxadd-isntall.log showed the problem (missing kernel headers). I guess I missed the error message buried in the middle of the text output from the GA install terminal window. Sorry for the trouble.

P.S. if it is easy to do, it might avoid such confusion if the installer would not install anything if an error occurs, and immediately stop after printing a big, prominent error message. Currently it continues on to install parts of a GA which can never work.

[Frank Mehnert]

There are pros and cons for making the installation of the Guest Additions fail if the modules cannot be compiled. Right now, the VM is still functional and the user can redo the module compilation by doing /etc/init.d/vboxadd setup.