[SOLVED] Guest Additions Installation (KERN_DIR problem)

[tigalch]

Moderator: SOLVED :)

[u271D]

I went to add/remove software and searched for gcc utility; it said "no results were found"

So what is the solution?

Yes with Linux I'm a noob :-D

[abhi541]

@aconti

Were you able to resolve the problem? I have vbox 4.3 and still I have the kern_dir error message in my log and vbox doesn't work.

Thanks!

[ADriHD]

I worked out what the issue was....

For some reason, installing kernel-devel was correctly resolving to: kernel-devel-2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64

but kernel-headers was resolving to: kernel-headers-2.6.32-504.1.3.el6.x86_64

After some cleanup work I managed to get it all happy again. The only thing I did was remove the peel repo totally :-/

[ADriHD]

Just to add (as my comment is still under moderation due to being new on here), it boiled down to:

under my current kernel:

/lib/modules/2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64

had two symlinks under it:

Code: Select all

]lrwxrwxrwx.  1 root root     42 Nov 18 17:45 build -> /usr/src/kernels/2.6.32-504.1.3.el6.x86_64
lrwxrwxrwx.  1 root root      8 Nov 18 17:46 source -> ./build/

The build was totally pointing to an updated kernel-headers, not only that, that directory didn't exist at all, only the one for my active kernel: /usr/src/kernels/2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64 but as I said, I cleaned up the installation, didn't use the epel6 repo which I was using (Rackspace) and all went well from there.

I'll take look later as to what happened.

[NormanDunbar]

I know I'm replying to an old thread, and I know it's marked as SOLVED, but there seems to be a missing part at the end.

I sufferend this problem with Centos 7 and VirtualBox 4.3.26 and the symptoms were the same. The problem was that the kernel-devel didn;t match the output from

Code: Select all

uname -r

so all I had to do, when I figured it out, was:

Code: Select all

yum remove kernel-devel
yum install kernel-devel-`uname -r`

After that, running VBoxLinuxAdditions.run worked perfectly.

Maybe, just maybe, this will help someone else.

Cheers,
Norm.

[avi.levi]

I know I'm replying to an old thread, and I know it's marked as SOLVED, but there seems to be a missing part at the end.

I sufferend this problem with Centos 7 and VirtualBox 4.3.26 and the symptoms were the same. The problem was that the kernel-devel didn;t match the output from

Code: Select all

uname -r

so all I had to do, when I figured it out, was:

Code: Select all

yum remove kernel-devel
yum install kernel-devel-`uname -r`

After that, running VBoxLinuxAdditions.run worked perfectly.

Maybe, just maybe, this will help someone else.

Cheers,
Norm.

Thank you sir!
I know that I should have figured out how to do this alone from the entire thread.
All the information was there.
But it is so nice to have someone just give you the answer and save you the trouble.
I wish more people would bother to just give the exact lines of code for a "solved" thread.

Thanks again.

[TrevorH]

Actually that's not really the correct solution. The problem is that your running kernel version does not match the version of the kernel-devel package that you just installed and the correct solution is to first install the matching kernel to go with your kernel-devel and then reboot so it is the running kernel. Then running kernel and kernel-devel versions match and it will work.

Your method means you uninstall the latest kernel-devel, install a back level one to match your back level kernel and now both need updating...

You should run yum update to make sure that everything is up to date.

[NormanDunbar]

Afternoon TrevorH

while what you say may be accurate, I installed kernel devel after a yum update to be sure I was up to date. The version of kernel devel that got installed obviously didn't match the running kernel.

I'm normally a Linux Mint user at home but this was my first time using Centos for a long time so I'm a bit rusty.

It's still working though. Even after lots of yum updates.


Cheers,
Norm.

[TrevorH]

You forgot to reboot into the newer kernel after the yum update.