At Work with Linux: VirtualBox 3.2.10 and Fedora 14

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As part of my duties as the unofficial lab manager and general lab rat, I took a little time to update an installation of VirtualBox from 3.2.8 to 3.2.10. I've been busy and I haven't had the time to keep on top of every little thing. Besides, if it works, leave it alone. Unfortunately, I ran into an issue installing Fedora 14 (more below) that motivated me to install the latest VirtualBox (VB).

And that's when I hit my second, far greater problem. It appears that VB 3.2.10 kernel modules will not install properly on the host version of Linux I run; RHEL 5.4 Workstation. Up to this point I've had no problems installing VB on RHEL (5.4 or 5.5), and the VMs created with VB have run with little or no problems. But this time I ran into problems when I attempted to start one of my VMs under the latest version of VB.

A "guru meditation" problem.

And this is what showed up in the syslog
!!Assertion Failed!!
Expression: RT_SUCCESS_NP(rc)
Location : /home/vbox/vbox-3.2.10/src/VBox/VMM/VMMAll/PGMAllPool.cpp(2337) int pgmPoolMonitorInsert(PGMPOOL*, PGMPOOLPAGE*)
PGMHandlerPhysicalRegisterEx 00000002094d2000 failed with -1701
I tried this twice (installing VB 3.2.10, the second time paying close attention to see if I did anything stupid). Turns out that during the RPM installation that there was a problem installing the kernel module.

Oh well. So I re-installed VB 3.2.8 and went on my merry way.

Fedora 14

The reason I decided to install VB 3.2.10 is because, under 2.6.8, not all of the VB features work with Fedora 14, specifically the seamless and infinitely resizable screen on the host desktop. Everything else works just fine.

I won't go into any boring details except to say that this version of Fedora was the most trouble free to install for quite some time. In fact, it seems to have some of the VB kernel goodness already baked in, because it at least knew about seamless mouse movement (where you can move between the VM and the host desktop without having to hit the right shift key) without having to install any of the VirtualBox extensions.

The only nit I have with the distribution so far is that it came with Firefox 3.6.10. I need to update to 3.6.12 due to a security issue.

Other than that, Fedora 14 runs just fine, without any drama. And that's the way it should be.

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 05, 2010

    3.6.12 went out as an official update already, I think.

    The mouse cursor thing - perhaps VBox can use the vmmouse driver which was originally for VMware? That's part of X.org and hence in the stock Fedora install.

    ReplyDelete

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