virtualbox guest additions problem, ububtu-17.04

[Stuart McGraw]

On 09/14/2017 04:40 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 14 September 2017 at 03:06, Stuart McGraw <smcg4191 at mtneva.com> wrote:
>> Turns out (I think) that the VirtualBox Guest Additions for
>> my version of VirtualBox (5.1.10)
> 
> Is there a particular reason that you're running an out-of-date version of VBox?

I'm running an out-of-date version of my OS (Fedora-23) and 5.1.10 is]
the latest version of Vbox available for it via the usual channels. :-)
 
> I suggest either running the version from your distro's repos -- this
> is what works best with Vagrant, for instance -- or the current
> version.
> 
>> I still don't understand what all the virtualbox-guest-*
>> packages in the Ubuntu repositories are for but other
>> than curiosity it is moot for me at this point.
> 
> The VBox hypervisor is now fully open source.

> [... snip lots of good stuff detailing the different 
>  versions of virtualbox available...]

> Summary:
> 
> [1] run the latest VBox: either the latest one with your OS, or the
> latest downloadable version.
> [2] keep the guest additions current, too.
> 
> Corollary to these points:
> 
> [3] if you need something that's in a more recent version of the guest
> additions, then you probably ought to upgrade the host hypervisor as
> well.

My reason for running VMs is to explore the possibility of switching
distributions.  Hence I don't really want to go through the considerable
effort of upgrading my Fedora box only to dump that work a few weeks later
in favor or Ubuntu or Arch (the two leading candidates for me).

My circumstance is unusual though and I think in general what you 
advise makes good sense.

And thanks for that info about Vbox options, I wasn't aware of any of
that.