Howto | VirtualBox Mismatch

Posted in: technology. Tagged: linux, howto, virtualisation

I have been told that installing package virtualbox-ose-dkms solves all these problems. I have installed and it reported that my modules were up-to-date, which is promising. I shall try and remember to update this page later, but I thought I’d write this now in case I forget!!

Solving VirtualBox Mismatch

If you install virtualbox-ose under Debian, along with virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6, there can be a mismatch between versions, which will prevent VirtualBox from running. At the time of writing virtualbox-ose is at version 1.66 and virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6 is at 1.62.

Unfortunately you need to build the kernel module yourself.

Step 1: Determine modules package name

$ dpkg -l "virtualbox-ose-modules*" | grep ii
ii  virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.30-2-amd64 3.0.12-dfsg-1+2.6.30-8squeeze1 VirtualBox modules for Linux (kernel 2.6.30-

Take a note of this package name for the next step.

Step 2: Uninstall the Debian package

$ sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.30-2-amd64

Step 3: Install VirtualBox Source

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-source
$ sudo module-assistant auto-install virtualbox-ose

This will produce a custom virtualbox-ose-modules package in /usr/src, which will then be used to install.

Look out for error messages, if it states that a deb file already exists, remove it and try again.

Step 4: Load Kernel Driver

This step was carried out automatically in the version that I have.

$ sudo modprobe -r vboxdrv
$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv