Upgrade to Xenial Xerus, Virtualbox, and more..

Each time upgrading the Ubuntu is like taking a challenge. When I bought this laptop in 2014 February, I installed Ubuntu 13.10, and later upgraded it to the next LTS version in August (14.04.1). Now this is my second upgrade in this laptop, again to the next LTS version (16.04.1 - Xenial Xerus). While this is all exciting, all upgrades come with some breaks in previously working and stable software. This time, VirtualBox is broken. I am sure it is not the only one though.

So I got this error, when I tried to open an existing VM or create a new VM in the VirtualBox following my upgrade.

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.



When I tried to do as suggested:

root@llovizna:/home/pradeeban# /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules ...done.
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules ...done.
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMSERROR: Cannot create report: [Errno 17] File exists: '/var/crash/virtualbox-4.3.0.crash'
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 4.4.0-31-generic (x86_64)
Consult /var/lib/dkms/vboxhost/4.3.28/build/make.log for more information.
 ...failed!
  (Failed, trying without DKMS)
Recompiling VirtualBox kernel modules ...failed!
  (Look at /var/log/vbox-install.log to find out what went wrong)

Finally, I had to uninstall and reinstall everything

 
sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-\*
 

Downloaded the relevant package for Xenial Xerus 64 bit and installed again.

Luckily, all the VMs and virtual hard disks were safe and ready to use (thanks to virtualization!)