Virtual Box Guest Additions on a Live CD? [SOLVED]

[Member paf]

Background:

I would love to have a AntiX Live CD with development tools and Virtual Box Guest additions already installed.
The purpose is to teach C/assembly programming (in Linux) to students who already have a Windows or OSX machine, and don’t want/need/know to install Linux.
The Live CD with Virtual Box allows a fast start, and when the student manages to “corrupt” the Linux machine, all that is needed is a reboot.
The students save their work to a shared folder

Up to now, installing all the required software is easy, the virtualbox-utils package works ok, but when making an ISO from an “Hard disk” installation or remastering a Live USB, the VirtualGuest additions stop working.

I am using AntiX 19.4 64 bits (base) ISO.
Any clues, ideas or debug strategies to follow?

Many thanks for AntiX.
paf

• This topic was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by paf.

[Member Xecure]

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paf wrote:

I would love to have a AntiX Live CD with development tools and Virtual Box Guest additions already installed.

So, you mean you want antiX (as Host) to run other systems (as Guests) through VB on a Live environment?
You saw that running installed worked, but VB doesn’t seem to properly work on antiX-Live. Is this correct?

What are the symptoms?

I suspect that, when running antiX live (from CD/DVD or USB), the disable=<options> boot parameter (used to boot antiX live faster and lighter) is disabling the virtualbox service that “may” be needed to get the best out of VB on the system.

To check if this theory is correct, on the live environment with virtualbox not working, run
sudo service virtualbox start
and try VirtualBox again. If it works, you can change the disable boot parameter to use the “V” option (“v” disables virtualbox services, “V” enables virtualbox services).

When you have time, try it out just to confirm that the theory is correct, or if we need to explore other possibilities.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by Xecure.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member paf]

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Many thanks for the reply.
I think that the issue is solved now.

First step: running the guest additions service as suggested:
sudo service virtualbox-guest-additions start

Service says that is not running inside a Virtual Box VM…
So, very strange.

Next step, see how the additions script checks if it is inside a Virtual Box VM:
lspci -d 80ee:beef

Weird, there is no such device on my VM as one can see doing:
lspci -nn

The only devices that appear related to Virtual Box are 80ee:cafe (system peripheral) and 15ad:0405 (VMware SVGA II Adapter).
Could it be the “virtual” VGA adapter?
Yes, it is!

Complete description: Virtual Box recommends the use of the VMSVGA adapter (bot on OSX and Windows) and gives a warning whem one tries to use the other adapters (VBoxVGA and VBoxSVGA), but only those two adapters have a PCI ID of 80ee:beef.

If one uses a snapshot ISO, on Virtual Box, one must use a VBoxVGA or VBoxSVGA so that the Virtual Box Guest additions will start correctly.

Recommended correction:

On the virtualbox-guest-additions script replace 80ee:beef (VBox VGA) by 80ee:cafe (system peripheral).

And Many, MANY THANKS!

[Member Xecure]

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Good you found the solution.

For what I understand, you are running antiX as a GUEST, and not as a host.
When creating the virtual machine on Windows, Mac or Linux (or when changing its settings) to run any linux system as hosts, you should set the “Graphics controller” to VMSVGA. That is an easier step than changing virtualbox scripts.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member Xecure]

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I have antiX-19.4 full running inside virtualbox and there is no need to install any virtual-guest-additions (comes pre-instaleld) and if needed, they can be installed from the repos. And the virtualbox-guest-additions works perfectly out of the box, with the VMSVGA video controllers.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by Xecure.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member paf]

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I was not clear but, yes I am running AntiX as guest, and as Live CD.

AntiX works perfectly, but remastering it it “loses” the Virtual Box Extensions as was said above.

Even stranger, when I install Antix on a Virtual Box VM, the virtualbox-guest-additions script tests the presence of a 80ee:cafe device.

After creating an ISO snapshot from the installation, the virtualbox-guest-additions script tests the presence of a 80ee:beef device.

For now, the issue is solved (there is a workaround), but will look into it, to understand really what is happening.

Many thanks once again.

[Anonymous]

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look into it, to understand really what is happening.

As an automated step during antiX installation to hard drive, a housekeeping operation “live-to-installed” is performed.
I cannot recall whether the code for “live-to-installed” resides within the installer source code or is a freestanding utility script.
Among other details, the operation removes the no-longer-needed installer package
(would be confusing to still have an “install” icon on the desktop post-install, eh)
Perhaps that operation similarly regards “guest additions” as no-longer-needed, and automatically uninstalls the asssociated package.

> but remastering it it “loses” the Virtual Box Extensions

The term “remastering” may be too generic here.
live-remaster, which can only be performed from within a liveboot session, faithfully preserves the system content (including GuestAdditions packagefiles).

If proceeding from an already installed system, “iso-snapshot” does perform a “installed-to-live” routine (you can grep its source code to review the nitty-gritty details)… but IIRC does NOT automatically (re)inject GuestAdditions (nor does a user-configurable option exist within iso-snapshot to address this detail).

If proceeding from an already installed system, “live-usb-maker” probably does not automatically (re)inject GuestAdditions.
For live-usb-maker to produce a liveUSB in which GuestAdditions are pre-installed, you might:
temporarily install GuestAdditions onto the system prior to launching live-usb-maker and utilize its “clone(ing)” option.

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