Hi!
I’m new here, and I’m also a newbie as far as the vast Linux world is concerned. I installed openSUSE 11.1 (I’ve chosen KDE as graphic environment) on a virtual machine, using VirtualBox on a Windows Xp SP3 host machine. Even if the installation process was smooth, I had serious troubles in installing VBox guest additions in openSUSE with KDE. As I eventually managed to get them to work, I thought it would be nice if I wrote kind of a guide here, describing all I’ve done in order to make them work properly. I hope not to violate any rule of this forum.
So, let’s begin. Our goal is to install VBox guest additions. This piece of software will bring us some really nice features, such as mouse integration and dynamic resizing of the window.
Follow these steps:
- You first have to update the kernel. I’m not a programmer, so forgive me if I’m not as precise as I should be. Anyway, it could happen that you have different versions of some files which form the kernel. This can cause problems when you try to install VBox guest additions. In order to sort this problem out, open Yast and go to the packet management section. Then, in the search field, type “kernel-default”. Yast should display three packages: right click on all of them and select the update option. Finally, begin the update process and, once it’s installed everything, reboot your virtual machine;
- Next, we need to install a component called DKMS. You can follow this link (http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/isv:dell:community/suse11.1-x86_64/dkms.ymp) and use your packet management software to install it DKMS;
- Then, you need to install the GCC compiler, which is needed by the VBox guest additions installer to properly compile the installation files. In order to do this, open a console window and type the following command: "sudo zypper install gcc make automake autoconf kernel-source
"; - Now we are ready to install VBox guest additions! Mount VBox guest additions virtual image from devices menu in VirtualBox and type the following command on a console window: "sudo sh /media/VBOXADDITIONS_3.0.2_49928/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
". The installation process should begin; however, it might end with an error, similar to the following: “Disabling dynamic resizing as the X server is configured to only use static resolutions. To fix this, edit the server configuration file, remove all “Modes” lines from the “Screen” section and any Option “PreferredMode” lines from “Monitor” sections and restart the server*”. This means we have to edit a file called xorg.conf, located in /etc/X11. In order to edit this file, we should type the following in a console window: “kdesu kate /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. This command means we are going to edit xorg.conf using Kate, a text editor provided with KDE. Here, we will delete all the lines begininning with the word “Modes” in the “Screen” section and all the lines beginning with the word “Option” which also contain the word “PreferredMode” in the “Monitor” section (on my virtual machine I found one of such lines);
After we complete all these steps, the following features should be available:
- Desktop resizing, so that we can use, for instance, the HOST+F feature;
- Mouse integration, so that we do not need to press CTRL (right) to pass from guest to host and vice versa;
I hope this bref “tutorial” will be of some help. Sorry if my English is not perfect, but I’m not English mother-tongue.
I have been looking for hours how to find a solution for my problems with openSUSE 11.1 as a guest in VirtualBox 3.0, running in Vista (32bit). Nothing worked for me.