VirtualBox 3.1.4 Guest Additions and Fedora 12 Guest Problem

There is a problem with Fedora 12 kernel version 2.6.32.9-67 and the VirtualBox 3.1.4 Guest Additions. After you install the Guest Additions and reboot the virtual machine, you can only see a black screen. Usually, I would either press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to the shell terminal to change settings or edit the Grub menu to boot to a different run level. However, the key combination CTRL+ALT+F1 on VirutalBox does not work. The Grub menu on Fedora 12 is also hidden, and the timeout is set to 0, so you cannot modify it (talk about some nice design!).

After playing around with it for a while, I found a way to work around the problem. This is not a detailed guide, but I will outline what I did to fix it.

  1. Mount a Linux LiveCD to the CD/DVD devices. I prefer the KDE version of LiveCD.
  2. Restart the virtual machine. Press F12 immediately when the VM is starting up. Press C to boot to the LiveCD.
  3. Mount the boot partition of your primary disk.
  4. Use a text editor to edit the menu.lst file in grub directory of the boot partition. You might need to become superuser (root) to edit it.
  5. The default is set to 0, which is the latest kernel that doesn’t work with the Guest Additions. Change the value to 1, so the Guest Additions will not be loaded. While you are here, change timeout to 10 and comment out the hiddenmenu. This way, you can get a chance to modify the grub menu without using a LiveCD next time. The result is like the listing.
    default=1
    timeout=10
    #hiddenmenu
  6. Save the file and reboot.

The system will be booted to the previous kernel without the Guest Additions.


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1 Comment

  1. Fedora 12 kernel version 2.6.32.9-67 and the VirtualBox 3.1.4 Guest Additions

    – Or revert to previous kernel 2.6.31.12-174.2.22

    Bug is reported at bugzilla’s

    Likely we’ll have to wait for a new bug release update (from Oracle nowdays)

    By-the-way Oracle has a competing virtual product. So I wonder what the future of VBox will be (and for MySql also)

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