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!)

APIC configuration issue in VirtualBox

So I copied a Windows XP / 64 bit guest OS *vmd that was used by a VMWare to be used with my VirtualBox on the Ubuntu 11.10 / 64 bit host. When configured the VM to be "Windows XP", and pointed to the *vmd, when I start the guest windows operating system, the below error was printed in blue screen!

"Windows could not start because of a general computer hardware configuration problem. Attempting to load an x64 operating system, however this system does not have the APIC configured. Check your firmware settings. Make sure that the firmware has enabled the advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC) on this system. If the firmware does not have an APIC setting, please contact the system manufacturer for a firmware update to enable the local APIC."

It took me some time to identify the root cause! VirtualBox had an option, "Windows XP / 64 bit". I should have picked that, instead of "Windows XP".

After changing this too, however, "the machine didn't close properly last time" was being thrown always, not letting the windows to start properly - even after multiple trials. For some reason, when I opened it in VMWare, it had an option, whether the image was moved or copied. When I mentioned it was moved, it started with the repair mode. After that the same *.vmd started working fine with both VMWare and VirtualBox without any issues. This was a strange issue - however, glad VMWare was able to open and fix the issue, where now I can use it with VirtualBox. For me, it seems VirtualBox eats lesser memory than VMWare.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and the fixes

So here comes Lucid Lynx, an LTS (Long Time Support) version of Ubuntu after two years, giving so much of expectations. I can see many whistles such as the new theme which tries to wrap Ubuntu in a non-geeky cover, specially the shift from brown to purple. Twitter integration, UbuntuOne, Mac like theme, which still seem whistles to a user, unless he is literally a kid which can rarely be the case for a Linux user. Ubuntu 10.04 was released on 30th of April, with the code name Lucid Lynx. This has become the long time support version of Ubuntu after Ubuntu 8.04, known as Hardy Heron, making a huge expectation from the user base.

I did upgrade my operating system from Ubuntu 9.10. The upgrade had introduced me few bugs, which I have fixed without much difficulty. As there are many users out there facing similar issues, work arounds for many of the bugs can be found online, and that's the biggest supportive force behind Ubuntu, as well as the other FOSS projects, I would say.

Let me share few of the issues I had to fix after the upgrade.

After the upload, when each time the computer started, this annoying error was thrown. "An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb. Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery." I realized this was due to a usb fix I did for Virtualbox for Ubunut Karmic Koala which is no more required after the upgrade to Lucid. To fix this, in terminal,
sudo vim /etc/fstab
Removing the line we had added from the file, "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devig=123,devmod=664 0 0" from the fstab fixed this issue, according to the Ubuntu Community's help page for Virtualbox/USB.

"The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:Deskbar_Applet". Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?", an error message was thrown immediately after the upgrade. I deleted it, and it seems I didn't lose any deskbar applets at all.

An annoying bug that I had to fix was, "Desktop effects could not be enabled.", where I was unable to go for the 'Normal' and 'Extra' visual effects from the 'None'. That obviously was due to an error in the graphics card driver, I felt. Command lspci shows the PCI buses and the devices, where we can get the details of the graphics controller installed, where mine was
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07).
This had many workarounds on the web. Anyway I found the reason for the issue as well as a nice fix here, which finally made my Lucid free from the annoying bugs introduced during the upgrade.
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf

Though the new purplish Mac-like theme got a huge attention, as I was already using Mac4Lin theme, this new enhancements to the look n feel failed to impress me, as I felt Mac4Lin still leads!

The first software that I tried after the upgrade was, Zekr - A Qur'an Study Tool, which obviously is a cool tool for the Muslim brethren, as I see. As the final note, I really feel that I shouldn't go for 'Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat', which will be released this October. The reason simply is, I am not ready to spend days for downloading the upgrade files of 4 GB and fixing bugs to move from an LTS version to just a normal version.

yay yay.. Blue.. Screen..

I hit into this blue screen while running my Windows XP on VirtualBox OSE on Ubuntu. Anyway I could solve the issue with the help of this post. Frequent appearance of the blue screen on Windows OS makes me smile really 'big'.

VirtualBox OSE and Audio

My Windows XP guest operating system on Ubuntu Jaunty host was not giving any audio output. I checked the Settings of the VirtualBox OSE, and in the Audio Settings, it was set to Host Audio Driver - ALSA Audio Driver and Audio controller - SoundBlaster 16. I changed those parameters to PulseAudio and ICH AC97, and restarted Windows XP host machine. Wow.. all the audio applications on my Windows guest is playing cool now. But I tried to play an audio clip on my Ubuntu host. Alas! No sound in my Ubuntu host now! I shut down the Windows XP guest operating system. Then all the audio applications were running as usual in my Ubuntu host operating system.

I tried to start Windows XP guest while listening to an audio clip in my Ubuntu host operating system. A warning appeared as the Windows loaded and Windows started, yet again with no sound at all. Hence I came to the conclusion that, currently for my host/guest operating systems combination (Ubuntu Jaunty / Windows XP), audio will be available either to guest or host, but not to the both at once. Seems this bug is found and reported in VirtualBox OSE bug databases when I did a google search for this.

An update: Recently I was able to get the audio in both the host and guest simultaneously, without any further modification. I guess, at that time some other processes were blocking the audio sharing between the host and the guest.

VirtualBox

I have installed VirtualBox OSE in my Ubuntu Jaunty and installed Windows XP as a guest operating system. Installed guest additions, and started the guest operating system and added some shared folders from the Host operating system file system. Then with the windows XP [guest OS], Tools -> Map network drive, now I have the common location writable from both the host and the guest operating systems. 

This made my GSoC testing easy, as I no more have to copy the executable to Windows machine from the Ubuntu one, which is used to cross build it. Build once. Run from host and guest from the same location. Virtualbox (or the similar available Virtual Machine software) guest operating systems are the cool way to have multiple operating systems with the possibility of simple file sharing.