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I installed Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (2015 September) and I used Ubuntu Software Centre to install VirtualBox. I encountered this error:

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)
The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not 
loaded or there is a permission
problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module 
by executing
'/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup'
as root. If it is available in your distribution, you should install the 
DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes
and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary.

To deal with this problem, I first used

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

When that did not fix VirtualBox, I tried various fixes suggested at this link:

question and answers

What are the adverse consequences for having tried the most popular answer:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
sudo dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms  
sudo modprobe vboxdrv

and the adverse consequences of having tried this suggestion from a less popular answer:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall virtualbox-dkms

Epilogue: I used Ubuntu Software Centre to uninstall VirtualBox and then I used the instructions from the virtualbox.org to successfully install it. However, I am still interested in the adverse effects of the trial and error activities. Should Ubuntu be reinstalled to clean up the effects of the trial and error activity?

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  • In my experience virtualbox complained about dkms being unable to build module for the latest kernel but older kernel like 3.13 worked. The way i fixed it is by installing virtualbox from the official site. You may wanna try the same. Virtualbox in Ubuntu repository may be dated or something Sep 26, 2015 at 6:42

1 Answer 1

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There are no adverse effects to action you took and all of them were necessary. Let's see them in detail,


sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

This command installs linux headers which are a requirement for virtualbox. uname -r portion here give name and version of your os, you could even type it in a terminal to check output yourself.


sudo dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms  

This command reconfigured virtualbox-dkms package. Normally a package gets configure at its install time but since you already had virtualbox-dkms package, you had to use dpkg-reconfigure.


sudo modprobe vboxdrv

This modprobe command here is used to set kernel modules. Virtualbox requires vboxdrv kernel module, thats why you have to modprobe it. Try man modprobe to find more about it.


sudo apt-get install --reinstall virtualbox-dkms

This command simply reinstalled virtualbox-dkms package. This command also has no adverse effect but it makes sudo dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms useless since package virtualbox-dkms will be reinstalled anyway so we dont need to reconfigure it.

Hope that clears it up :). Also On a sidenote do run sudo apt-get autoremove --purge that will remove any left redundant package with it settings. If you want to get rid of apt cache you could also do apt-get clean.

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