Install Virtualbox on SLES 11 SP3

Edmund Haselwanter | 22.03.2014 DevOps

I had some trouble installing VirtualBox on SLES 11 SP3, so here are some notes on what you want to do

Prepare the Build Environment

The VirtualBox rpm needs to compile and install kernel modules. We have to ensure that every dependency for that process is ready. Versions are very important here


          1
          uname -a
        
          2
          Linux dq1bc01b08 3.0.76-0.11-default #1 SMP Fri Jun 14 08:21:43 UTC 2013 (ccab990) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Now we now that we have to install version 3.0.76-0.11 of the kernel-default-devel package which will install the correct kernel-source package as a dependency:


          1
          zypper in kernel-default-devel-3.0.76-0.11.1.x86_64

To be able to compile the module we need some additional packages installed


          1
          zypper in autoconf bison flex gcc gcc-c++ make m4

Next we need to use the same config our kernel was build the last time. If you did not do anything special you have to use the matching config which is stored in /boot/


          1
          cp -f /boot/config-$(uname -r) /usr/src/linux/.config
        
          2
          cd /usr/src/linux
        
          3
          make prepare
        
          4
          make modules_prepare

Install VirtualBox

Next we need to download the SLES packages for VirtualBox. At the time of writing I got this versions:


          1
          http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.8/VirtualBox-4.3-4.3.8_92456_sles11.0-1.x86_64.rpm
        
          2
          http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.8/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.3.8-92456.vbox-extpack

Now we are ready to install VirtualBox


          1
          zypper install VirtualBox-4.3-4.3.8_92456_sles11.0-1.x86_64.rpm

To use PXE booting we need to install the extpack


          1
          VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.3.8-92456.vbox-extpack

Additional Notes

If anything goes wrong start over by at least

copy the kernel config
uninstall the kernel-sources
uninstall the Virtualbox package

I got bitten by "install the latest package version" of the kernel-source package.


          1
          zypper rm kernel-default-devel
        
          2
          zypper rm kernel-source
        
          3
          zypper rm VirtualBox

References

fix no symbol version for module layout

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