Hello Felix, We started discussing this on IRC, but I will include it for background as it might be of interest to other people. I noticed when installing Alpha 3 of Ubuntu 11.10 in order to test the Guest Additions there that the operating system detected that it was running in VirtualBox and offered to install Additions itself via the Additions Drivers" feature. On the whole I think this is a good thing, as it makes for a good user experience both from the point of view of Ubuntu and of VirtualBox, but I am slightly worried that unless this feature is actively maintained during the active lifetime of Ubuntu versions (and possibly beyond) that it may lead to more users using mismatching versions of VirtualBox and the Guest Additions, which clearly won't provide the best experience, and I was hoping that we could think this through to find a solution that both of us are happy with. I don't know how deeply you are involved with the Ubuntu side of this - do you know anyone else we should be talking to?
One way of handling this would be for Ubuntu to automatically download and run a Guest Additions installer from Oracle (or mirror the installer themselves), checking for the right version before downloading. (VirtualBox versions as of 3.0.4 can be detected using "dmidecode -u | grep vboxVer", versions as of 1.5.0 if necessary by dd-ing the BIOS and running it through the "strings" command.) What we would certainly appreciate would be for released versions of Ubuntu to be able to support new versions of VirtualBox as they are released - or to drop the Additions installation feature altogether when a release gets to a point when Ubuntu no longer wish to update it. On IRC you mentioned testing as something which worried you (the Additions Drivers window says that the Additions have been "tested by the Ubuntu developers" - does that mean you in this case?) as you wish to have tested every combination which you support but don't have the time to test every release of Ubuntu with every version of VirtualBox. On the whole I don't have a good answer here if you are not willing to pass the buck on to us. Though we do do quite a bit of testing of the Guest Additions before releasing it is mainly limited to the newest version of a number of distributions, which of course covers quite a range of kernel and X.Org versions. Though we expect any "reasonable" system as of Linux 2.4.21 (I think it was) and XFree86 4.3 to work with the Additions we tend to rely on users to report breakage with systems at the older end of the range. However even Ubuntu 4.10 should be sufficiently new to have a relatively low risk of breakage. (Having claimed that I will now have to install a copy if I can find one!) Please let me know what your thoughts are on this subject. Regards, Michael -- ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG Michael Thayer Werkstrasse 24 VirtualBox engineering 71384 Weinstadt, Germany mailto:[email protected] Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603 Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V. Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697 Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz, Marcel van de Molen, Alexander van der Ven _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
