Posts Tagged ‘virtualbox’

Vagrant Fails To Start VM with Bad Default Machine Folder

I’m here at PuppetConf in Portland and one of the speakers got me all excited again about Vagrant. I’ve played around with Vagrant before, but he was showing off some awesome features that I didn’t realize existed which made me want to play with the tool again (more on that later!). Anyway, I updated all the versions of things Vagrant-related and tried to use it again. However, when I downloaded one of the default images from the getting started page I was greeted with an awesomely descriptive error:

[default] Importing base box 'lucid32'...
The VM import failed! Try running `VBoxManage import` on the box file
manually for more verbose error output.

Running it with VBoxManage as instructed gave a slightly-better-yet-not-so-useful error:
VBoxManage: error: Appliance file must have .ovf extension
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80bb0004), component Appliance, interface IAppliance, callee nsISupports
Context: "Read(Bstr(pszAbsFilePath).raw(), progressRead.asOutParam())" at line 302 of file VBoxManageAppliance.cpp

A few Google searches for this error got me almost nowhere except that it was likely a VirtualBox configuration issue. Great. After digging around for far too long, I figured out that it was because when I had played with Vagrant/VirtualBox in the past I had configured VirtualBox’s default machine folder to an external drive that I didn’t have plugged in! Doh. Anyway, was a pretty easy fix but I thought I’d share if it saved someone some time. The default machine folder is set on the first screen in the VirtualBox preferences window (at least for me on my Mac).

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Sep 23rd, 2011

Installing VirtualBox OSE on Ubuntu 8.04

Tonight I wanted to play with a couple of Linux distros on my desktop and I decided to install VirtualBox since it’s free and already has packages in Ubuntu for it. That turned into a much longer process than I thought, but not too bad. There’s a couple of steps that the open source edition’s installer on Ubuntu that are missed.

I installed VirtualBox through the Add/Remove Applications GUI application. When I ran VirtualBox, created a virtual machine, and tried to boot it I was greeted with an error:
VirtualBox kernel driver not installed. The vboxdrv kernel module was either not loaded or /dev/vboxdrv was not created for some reason. Please install the virtualbox-ose-modules package for your kernel, e.g. virtualbox-ose-modules-generic..

Apparently you have to install an additional module which Ubuntu conveniently left out. To get the correct module for any running kernel that you are using:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-`uname -r`

Fine. My module is now installed. I went to boot up my VM again..
The VirtualBox kernel driver is not accessible to the current user. Make sure that the user has write permissions for /dev/vboxdrv by adding them to the vboxusers groups. You will need to logout for the change to take effect..

I had to add my user to the vboxusers group in order to gain access to the VirtualBox module:
sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a user

Log out and log back in and voila, VM boots.

Slightly irritating, but not too bad.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (3) : Jul 22nd, 2009