Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Oracle Virtualbox Guest Additions Won’t Install on Ubuntu 22.04

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
VirtualBox image

Oracle Virtualbox Guest Additions won’t automatically install under Ubuntu 22.04. Even if you haven’t been there before, you are going to be there now if you install Ubuntu 22.04 in a VM. Canonical is relentless when it comes to bad ideas they force on unsuspecting users. (Unity Desktop anyone? How about Up-Start, Snap, or Ubuntu Phone?) This time a change was made to remove autorun capabilities without really giving much of a heads up.

I’ve written about Oracle Virtualbox and Guest Additions woes before. On certain platforms Microsoft has went out of their way to make Oracle Virtualbox almost impossible to either install or function. So I guess I should have seen Canonical shooting themselves in the foot yet again coming, right?

In the Name of Security

Ah yes, security. Something a VM install has very little of. You can do all kinds of things to the install without the OS even running, but hey, let’s not autorun ISO files. People can download and launch an AppImage that isn’t the least bit sandboxed. Most users will blindly key in their Sudo password whenever prompted without even wondering what asked for it, but, just to kick Oracle in the teeth, let’s remove autorun. While we are at it, let’s completely overlook the fact that Freespire and other Linux distros have started to physically block the installation of Snap for security reasons.

You have to open the CD

Ordinarily, for most other Linux distros, you click on Devices and select “insert Guest Additions CD image” and that is it. If you have installed all of the build dependencies, Guest Additions opens a terminal, does some stuff, then it tells you to close the window and informs you the new functionality won’t be available until you restart. We developers have become accustomed to this behavior.

Not anymore!

Now you have to open the CD image that appears in the left menu bar. You see a little button that says “Run Software” but it is a fool killer. You can click it until you run out of food, water, and air; nothing will happen.

After right click

You have to right click on the autorun.sh file and choose “Run as a Program.”

Nice, huh?

Snap is being blocked from installation in linux distros do to security issues, and rather than fix that you do this?

Canonical has gotten in bed with Microsoft far too often.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.