bobpeers -> blog

After trying Google Chrome OS I moved onto Fedora 12 in Virtualbox. As always it installed fine and in no time I was at the default Fedora 12 desktop. Next step was to install the guest additions to allow for screen resizing and seamless modes.

After installing and rebooting, my X server wouldn’t start. I dropped into a virtual terminal only to see that Xorg could not find any screens to use (Fedora 12 has no xorg.conf, it use HAL to detect the displays instead). This happens in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

It seems this is a general problem that can be fixed by creating your own xorg.conf with the required settings. The second link I provided has the fix.

I haven’t tried it myself yet but hopefully a new version of Virtualbox will soon fix the problem. It did occur to me that it would be nice if there were an easy way to uninstall guest additions to fix problem like this, at least then I could make a temporary fix to investigate the problem.

Using Virtualbox 1.6 you cannot install guest additions support when using a Fedora 9 guest. Yet another consequence of using leading edge distributions that have a release candidate of Xorg. Hopefully the next update of Virtualbox will rectify this situation.

Here’s the output when you try to install the guest additions:

# ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 1.6.0 Guest Additions for Linux
installation............................................................
........................................................................
.........................................
VirtualBox 1.6.0 Guest Additions installation
which: no dkms in (/usr/bin:/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin)
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel module...
Building the shared folder support kernel module...
Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions...

Detected Xorg 1.5 RCx, refusing to install the Xorg modules. We will
provide
updated guest additions once Xorg 1.5.0 was released finally. Please
check
the vbox-users mailing list for further announcements.
Successfully installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions.
You must restart your guest system in order to complete the
installation.