16.04 LTS and Virtualbox 5.2

Question

I am struggling with making Virtualbox 5.2 work with 16.04 LTS. I've read everything posted on the topic here. The installation path that resulted in moving forward was via .deb package from Oracle website (and the respective extension pack manually added). I have the virtualbox manager GUI loading just fine. However, when I try to start a virtual machine, kernel-related error messages keep popping up. First, I had trouble with 'vboxdrv' and fixed it by signing kernel modules as suggested here Could not load 'vboxdrv' after upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 (and I want to keep secure boot) After that, starting a VM results in a different error: "RTR3InitEx failed with rc=-1912. The Virtualbox kernel modules do not match this version of VirtualBox" Running /sbin/vboxconfig resulted in failure, and this is what I can see in the log: "SUP_IOCTL_COOKIE: Version mismatch. Requested: 0x290000 Min: 0x290000 Current: 0x240000". What is next? Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is what I did.

Step 1: Setup Apt Repository

Firstly edit /etc/apt/sources.list file and add the following line: deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian xenial contrib

Do this by opening the Software Updater and click on Settings. Click on "Other Software", then click "Add..." button. Copy line above into it. Close, then click "Reload".

Step 2: Setup Oracle public key

After adding required apt repository in your system, download and import the Oracle public key for apt-secure using following commands.

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Step 3: Install Oracle VirtualBox

After completing above steps, let’s install VirtualBox using following commands. If you have already installed any older version of VirtualBox, Below command will update it automatically.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.2

Step 4: Install dkms packages to ensure that the VirtualBox host modules are correctly updated if the kernel version changes during the next upgrade.

sudo apt-get install dkms

Step 5: Start VirtualBox

We can use dashboard shortcuts to start VirtualBox or simply run following command from a terminal.

virtualbox

On your first start, VirtualBox may prompt you to accept the license agreement. Updates will come automatically.

Recommendation:

Virtual Box offers a “Guest Additions”; a package of device drivers and system applications which typically improves performance, especially of graphics.