Tag: virtualbox

Finally have a working Arch Linux install

Chad

For some reason, I’m really drawn to Arch Linux. I’ve used it in the past(probably a couple of years ago), with decent success. However, recently I’ve been wanting to try it again, but am having many issues. I won’t go in to the issues I’m having, yet, as I haven’t researched deeply in to them, and want to before I start bad-mouthing the distro.

That being said, I got a full working Arch Linux install up and running last night in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The only trick I had to do was choose the IDE-Legacy boot option during the install. After that, everything just worked. And what was amazing to me, is that networking was working from the get go on it, and I was using my laptop via wireless. So VirtualBox must pass whatever networking the host computer is using to it’s virtual adapter. Thats was cool and somewhat unexpected.

Once the base was installed, I was easily able to install gdm, gnome, xfce , and fluxbox and everything worked perfectly. I’m really liking Xfce, and Arch already has the latest(4.4) available in its repositories. So that was cool to check out. I did get an error installing xfce4-goodies though, but it wasn’t a show stopper.

Arch is fast. Even in a virtual machine, everything is very snappy. I really want to get it working on my workstation or even my laptop as the main install.

Permissions error using VirtualBox

Chad

I downloaded and installed VirtualBox on my Debian Etch laptop and I experienced a permissions error the first time I tried to start a virtual machine, however it worked fine running as root. The fix is easy and was found in the FAQ of the VirtualBox website.

If you get a message saying “VirtualBox kernel driver not accessible, permission problem” when starting VirtualBox right after installation, make sure that your user account is listed in the vboxusers group. The installation takes care creating that group, but you will need to manually add all users to it that should be allowed to run VirtualBox. As root, for each such user, run usermod -G vboxusers -a . If any of the affected users are currently logged in, they need to log out for the changes to take effect. In case any user already attempted to start VirtualBox before logging out (which launches the VBoxSVC service process with incorrect permissions), that user additionally needs to run VirtualBox shutdown from the command line to terminate the service. This solves the permission problems. (Alternatively, a reboot will help as well.)