How to fix issues between VirtualBox and Ubuntu 17.10

Joaquín García

2 minutes

The famous Intel bug is causing great harm to computer users. Curiously not because of the hardware but because of the updates and patches that promise to solve this bug and are sometimes more harmful than the bug itself.

In Ubuntu 17.10, multiple users, have had problems with these security patches and version. Many users, after updating, lost the functioning of certain programs such as VirtualBox. These are usually programs that interact with the kernel like Virtualbox.

If, in addition, we have the VirtualBox server tools installed, the problem can be very serious and even lose the desktop. To solve this, we have to uninstall Virtualbox, reinstall it without making it work and install the Virtualbox security pack. It is something very simple if we write the following in the terminal:

sudo apt remove --purge virtualbox*

This is to uninstall VirtualBox. Then we have to reinstall it with the following commands:

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian xenial contrib" &gt;&gt; /etc/apt/sources.list'

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt install virtualbox-5.2

And with this we will have the latest version of VirtualBox in Ubuntu 17.10. Now it's time to install the security package that fixes this problem. For this we have to go to the official download website and when we have it, we open the package directly with Virtualbox. This will update the version we have of the program to version 5.2.4, a stable version that corrects all the problems that exist between the Meltdown and Specter patches and VirtualBox.

As you can see, the solution is quite simple, but you have to know that it is really Virtualbox that causes this failure. Although we have to say that the program is not to blame in this case but rather the solution, a solution that has been criticized by many experts such as Linus Torvalds himself, but it is the only one we have until kernel 4.16 comes out ...

Source - UbuntuLion


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  1.   Albert Barber said
    ago 6 years

    Here you are invited to get version 5.2.4 ... Does this mean that the new versions 5.2.6 of Virtualbox and the Extension Pack are not stable? And, in your case, does it imply that, if they give you problems, you could reinstall the previous ones without loading all the programs that you already have installed in Virtualbox 5.2.6?

    Reply to Alberto Barbero
  2.   Juan said
    ago 6 years

    I had to go back from kernel 4.13 because it is not compatible with the latest beta version of virtualbox ... hopefully soon it will be since those of AMD without DAL support are screwed.

    Reply to Juan