Missing VBoxGuestAdditions.ISO?

WetGeek

The section on VBoxGuestAdditions from the user manual for the current version of VirtualBox says:

"The Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions for all supported guest operating systems are provided as a single CD-ROM image file which is called VBoxGuestAdditions.iso. This image file is located in the installation directory of Oracle VM VirtualBox. To install the Guest Additions for a particular VM, you mount this ISO file in your VM as a virtual CD-ROM and install from there"

This has appeared to be true for Solus until recently. I've previously installed the guest additions many times in many different virtual machines. Now, using every search tool I'm familiar with, I cannot find VBoxGuestAdditions anywhere on my up-to-date Solus Plasma laptop, which is the host machine for most of my VMs. This leads me to believe that there may be something missing from our VirtualBox-current package.

The eopkg search-file command returns: "'VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' does not belong to an installed package"

My previous questions regarding where should I look for this .ISO file on my system have been unanswered. I'm now hoping that someone on our development team can answer that question. And if no one knows where that .ISO file is on a Solus system, we need to figure out why that is.

The VirtualBox manual is unambiguous on that matter. The guest additions must exist on the host, in order for the host to insert that .ISO into the guest OS's virtual CD drive when requested.

My interest is not theoretical. I need my Windows 10 virtual machine in order to operate a peripheral (Brother P-Touch label maker) that's plugged into a USB port on my laptop, and that peripheral's drivers and editing software are available only for Windows and Macintosh.

This arrangement currently works -- mostly -- but my Windows 10 VM operates only in a window that's 1024x768 in size. That software is very difficult to use in a window that's a little over 1/3 the area of my laptop screen. The Windows version of the VBoxGuestAdditions would allow it to operate at full-screen on my laptop.

[deleted]

Like pointed out in one of your earlier threads, the ISO is available at https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.8/VBoxGuestAdditions_7.0.8.iso

For configuration of the USB support, refer to https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/software/virtualization/virtualbox

WetGeek

[deleted] Like pointed out in one of your earlier threads, the ISO is available at

Thanks for your response. I must have somehow missed that answer, but it's an answer to the wrong question. What I'm asking now is where is it on my Solus Plasma computer. Not where I could download it from. Where is it on my laptop, so that the host machine can insert it into the guest's virtual CD drive as the documentation states? I cannot do that using the software currently installed on Solus.

It's documented to exist in the installation folder for Oracle VirtualBox. Where is that on a Solus machine?

EbonJaeger

WetGeek What I'm asking now is where is it on my Solus Plasma computer.

It's where ever you downloaded it to. It isn't included in the package, and it doesn't look like it ever was.

WetGeek

I tried to download the guest additions from the link you provided, and the first attempt failed. I tried a second time, and succeeded to download a file, but an attempt to examine it with arc returned this error:

When I told arc to go ahead and open the .ISO as Read-Only, it then returned this error.

Perhaps this is why VirtualBox's attempts to fetch the guest additions online don't succeed?

[deleted]

WetGeek Did you even try using it in VirtualBox?

WetGeek

[deleted] Did you even try using it in VirtualBox?

Of course I've tried using it in VirtualBox. The problem: I'm not ABLE to use it in VirtualBox. I strongly suspect--based on everything I've seen--that it doesn't EXIST in VirtualBox on my Solus computer.

I don't know why it should be so hard for me to find out where a package is installed on my computer.

WetGeek

EbonJaeger It's where ever you downloaded it to. It isn't included in the package, and it doesn't look like it ever was.

Thanks for confirming that. That's not supposed to happen. According to the documentation, it's supposed to be installed in the Oracle VirtualBox installation folder, and it certainly was in previous versions of the product. I've been using VirtualBox on a Solus computer since 2019, and I've installed the guest additions on guest OSs many times. It's always worked as documented, until now.

That's what I've been trying to explain all this time. This is how it's supposed to get into the VM's CD drive:

But when I try to do that, this is the error that is reported:

And when I accept the option to download the guest additions from the Internet that fails:

The guest additions .ISO is supposed to be installed ON THE HOST (my laptop) in the same folder that VirtualBox is installed in. That's why VirtualBox can't find it in the image above. This is new. Previous installations did not create this error.

[deleted]

WetGeek Mount the ISO in the drive.

WetGeek

[deleted] Mount the ISO in the drive.

How? Have you ever used VirtualBox? And what .ISO? The one that I can't successfully download from the link you posted? I quoted from the manual in the first message in this thread. It explains where the guest additions .ISO should be installed. That's supposed to be part of the installation of the product, and it always has been in the past.

[deleted]

WetGeek You can mount the guest additions ISO like you would any other disc image. Just that you can't open it with Ark tells nothing.

Also, here's the package history including details of every included and modified file within virtualbox packages, feel free to point out when the ISO has been removed: https://dev.getsol.us/source/virtualbox/history/master/

WetGeek

[deleted] You can mount the guest additions ISO like you would any other disc image.

No one so far has explained why this .ISO is not present in the VirtualBox installation folder, so VirtualBox can install it on guest OSs, except @EbonJaeger , who says it's not there because it's not in the package. The question then becomes, "why isn't it in the package"? It's supposed to be there, according to the VirtualBox documentation.

When it's been downloaded directly from virtualbox.org in the past (not a good idea, according to Solus), it's always been opened by VirtualBox after the download, and installed in its installation folder. This time, it was opened by default by Ark.

So, VirtualBox is not working the way it should, because it's installation is not putting the guest additions where they should be installed. It's not putting it anywhere.

WetGeek

[deleted] You can mount the guest additions ISO like you would any other disc image

Success, finally! After the first download of the guest additions .ISO file failed, and the default application to open it (Ark) failed the second time, I assumed it wasn't valid. But just to check for sure, I connected with my NAS, copied the .ISO file from the Downloads.Linux folder there to the Downloads.Windows folder, and mounted it in the Windows VM's DVD drive.

And I'm happy to say that it was able to successfully install those additions from the .ISO that appeared to me to be broken. It should have been opened by VirtualBox, and installed where VirtualBox could find it. I'm going to do that manually now.

I apologize if this thread has seemed adversarial at times. That was not my intention. In the current version of virtualbox.org, in the Downloads section, I could find no link to install the guest additions, as there was in the past. Thus, the only way I thought it could be installed anymore was via the host machine.

I'd STILL like to know where the VirtualBox installation folder is, so I can manually copy this .ISO there.

EbonJaeger

WetGeek I'd STILL like to know where the VirtualBox installation folder is, so I can manually copy this .ISO there.

/usr/lib64/virtualbox

The guest additions iso has definitely never been included by us; it's separate from the source tarball. Debian and the official Virtualbox package have a separate package for it which just downloads it and plops it in /usr/share/virtualbox/. Fedora and Arch also don't ship this file. If you want to make this easier to do with the package manager in the future, I would encourage you to file a package inclusion request.

WetGeek

EbonJaeger The guest additions iso has definitely never been included by us;

I realize that now. And I remember downloading versions of it from virtualbox.org in the past, after which VirtualBox was the default application to open it. That's apparently how it got installed in the same folder as VirtualBox, itself.

That didn't happen this time. I'm sorry for any stress I might have created in my attempts to get to the bottom of this. I suspect it may not have been installed on Solus together with VirtualBox is because the guest additions probably contains non-FOSS drivers and such. Thus, on systems that strive to be FOSS-only, VirtualBox can be installed without the additions.

Why the web site no longer includes a link to download the guest additions is a mystery I don't want to pursue. My Windows 10 VM is now a pleasure to use, and I thank everyone who was involved in making it so.

WetGeek

EbonJaeger I would encourage you to file a package inclusion request.

Done. I don't know how strongly Solus attempts to be 100% FOSS, so I don't know whether it can be installed by default with VirtualBox, but I figured it's worth asking. Perhaps it could be installed to the same location (per the user manual), but from a separate package that Solus provides? I don't think there's any ethical difference between that and requiring that users go somewhere else on the Internet and download it from there.

Both of the locations you mentioned have sub-folders, such that I'm not confident that I could get the .ISO in the right place -- the place where VirtualBox looks for it -- so I didn't copy it anywhere.

WetGeek

@EbonJaeger : I've discussed the problem with using VirtualBox VMs full-screen on a Wayland session. (Total lockup of the host and guest). I know I asked in the forum so I could find out whether anyone else could reproduce the problem, but I don't remember getting a confirmation.

I don't believe that I've written a bug report in Dev Tracker for this, and I couldn't find it there. But you've been able to locate entries before that I couldn't. Can you tell if such a bug authored by me is there? If so, what's its status? If a bug isn't there already, I'll create one now.

This seems to be a VirtualBox problem, but it needs to be investigated. I can use a Boxes VM at full screen in a Wayland session with no such problem. Doing that with a VirtualBox VM immediately causes a lockup.

ermo

The way I see it, @WetGeek, you're about an inch away from volunteering yourself to become the maintainer of VirtualBox on Solus.

WetGeek

@EbonJaeger : Please disregard my previous post. I DID file a bug for this problem, and it was assigned a normal priority and the project Wayland by TClark77. (ManiphestT10541) I searched again, using different terms, and found it.

Apparently nothing has been done yet - at least, no further comments have been added after mine.

EbonJaeger

WetGeek If I remember correctly, you discovered that it occurs on other distros as well, indicating that it's an upstream issue, which you'd have to wait for the VirtualBox devs (or whoever else it is) to solve. It's not shown in the issue, but I thought I read that in a forum post.

Also, please keep in mind that all of us have been very busy on various stack upgrades and package updates that we're finally catching up on from 3 or so months of downtime, plus a lot of other things that haven't been shared publically.

WetGeek

EbonJaeger If I remember correctly, you discovered that it occurs on other distros as well, indicating that it's an upstream issue

Yes, and I didn't know at the time whether it was an Oracle issue (for VirtualBox) or a KDE issue (for Wayland). My money is now on VirtualBox, because I've created a number of VMs with Boxes that do NOT lock up anything when used at full screen in a Wayland session.