updating Virtualbox (non-OSE)

[Derek Broughton]

I just upgraded to VBox 2.0, and ran into a gotcha I remembered from an
earlier upgrade:

$ cat /var/log/vbox-install.log
Makefile:153: *** Error: /usr/src/linux (version 2.6.26) does not match the
current kernel (version 2.6.26-5-generic).  Stop.


Now, I remember this with the last upgrade, and that the fix was actually
fairly simple (the kernel headers I have _are_ good for this purpose, so
it's just a matter of overriding a specific compile setting), but I can't
remember _what_ the fix is.

So I dug into the "vboxdrv setup" code, and see that it preferentially tries
to compile the kernel using "dkms".  dkms isn't installed by default, nor
as a dependency of virtualbox (it's a "Recommends", so I'm not sure why I
didn't get it, as I installed vbox with aptitude), so I did "sudo aptitude
install dkms" and then ran the vboxdrv setup again, and voila!  Everything
installed very nicely.  

So, if you have a problem installing virtualbox, try installing dkms first,
and repeat.
-- 
derek