Re: [owl-users] Owl kickstart - Owl-current (VirtualBox Guest Additions)

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 05:10:18PM -0500, David Parrish wrote:
> I like that idea, but for now I'm still stuck trying to get guest additions
> working with Owl.

FWIW, it's indeed a matter of taste, but personally I find it easier to
work with VMs by connecting to them over SSH from the host.  With NAT in
your VirtualBox, this means you just need to setup one outbound SSH
connection from the VM with port forwarding back to port 22 enabled in
that one.  You can script this (use a passphrase-less SSH keypair, put
command="sleep 86400" before the key in your authorized_keys on the host) -
even add it to your rc.local (in the VM).  And if you really want to
access VMs' files on the host as if they were local, you can use FUSE /
sshfs.  This avoids any kernel-level hacks.

Another thing you may want to do is enable gpm (mouse support in VM's
console).  It's done like this:

ln -s psaux /dev/mouse
echo MOUSETYPE=ps2 > /etc/sysconfig/mouse
service gpm start

> echo "Install virtualbox guest additions"
> cd /usr/src/
> unxz patch-308.11.1.el5.028stab102.1-combined.xz
> patch -p0 <patch-308.11.1.el5.028stab102.1-combined
> mv linux-2.6.18 linux
> cd /usr/src/linux
> yes "" | make oldconfig
> yes "" | make prepare
> yes "" | make modules_prepare

This is slightly wrong - most notably, you did not apply the Owl patch
to the kernel.  Please use the commands found here instead:

http://openwall.info/wiki/Owl/kernel-build#Sources-setup
http://openwall.info/wiki/Owl/kernel-build#Non-RPM-ed-kernel-build

(indeed, use the current versions of the patches in them).

> /tmp/vbox.0/vfsmod.c: In function 'sf_read_super_aux':
> /tmp/vbox.0/vfsmod.c:293:5: error: 'struct inode' has no member named 'u'
> /tmp/vbox.0/vfsmod.c: In function 'sf_clear_inode':
> /tmp/vbox.0/vfsmod.c:361:12: error: 'struct inode' has no member named 'u'
> /tmp/vbox.0/vfsmod.c:368:5: error: 'struct inode' has no member named 'u'

Well, I'm afraid these errors might not go away even with a proper
kernel build, and would need to be investigated and patched in the
source code manually.  This is probably not hard to do, but overall I
just would not go for this approach (with VirtualBox Guest Additions).

> At this point I'm at a loss.  I'm not sure if I have the right source,

Not fully - see above.

> or if VirtualBox Guest Additions are incompatible with Owl.

There may well be some minor incompatibilities (sufficient for the build
to fail, unfortunately) - we certainly have never tested that
combination.  Maybe we should, if there's demand.

Alexander