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Sometimes Ubuntu behave weird, which might be because because it runs within Virtualbox as a client OS.

I want to detect if Virtualbox guestaddition is installed, from within the VM client, and which version it is.

On the server it can be detected using the Virtualbox API, but I want to be able to detect it on the VM client itself.

Virtualbox guest addition can be installed using statement how-do-i-install-guest-additions-in-a-virtualbox-vm:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11

So apt-get must "know" about the installation. apt-get does not have a search function so I tried :

dpkg --list | grep virtualbox

with result :

bernard@bernard-vbox2:~$ dpkg --list | grep virtualbox
ii  unity-scope-virtualbox                    0.1+13.10.20130723-0ubuntu1                       all          VirtualBox scope for Unity
bernard@bernard-vbox2:~

Someting about Virtualbox, but not about Vbox guest addition

On my system I presume ( info source ) VBox guest addition is installed in

/opt/[VboxAddonsFolder]

The folder does exist on my system but I can not find a (general) method to retrieve the VBox guestaddition version.

On Takkat advise I installed VBox guest addition. My preference to do this in the terminal.

bash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-x11

Installed with succes my guestadditions.

Community
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Bernard
  • 461

1 Answers1

1

Virtual Box guest additions are installed as kernel modules. To see whether guest additions are installed, and to get information on the version we can issue:

modinfo vboxguest

This will give an output similar to this:

filename:       /lib/modules/3.13.0-24-generic/updates/dkms/vboxguest.ko
version:        4.3.10
license:        GPL
description:    Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions for Linux Module
author:         Oracle Corporation

Virtual Box guest additions installed on this machine hence is version 4.3.10.

Takkat
  • 144,580