Sabayon – Virtualbox Installation Woos

A little matter I would like to bring to your attention is our wiki page for Virtualbox can produce a small surprise.  The scenario is that you download Sabayon 8 version, install it and than decide to install Virtualbox and Virtualbox pulls a lot of stuff including a new kernel of 3.3.  Sabayon 8 iso comes with kernel 3.2 so when you go and install Virtualbox you are indirectly invoking a kernel upgrade.  So the question is how to install Virtualbox.

Well, here is what I would do.  We keep our packages updated so we might as well upgrade the kernel also, but instead I would do it in a bit of different order of just doing equo install virtualbox-bin, I’d start with kernel-switcher.

We can use equo search linux-sabayon to see what the latest kernel is.  And in my case it shows sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-3.3-r2 is the latest kernel.  To see what your current kernel version is, simply run uname -r.

So now we can upgrade the kernel with:

kernel-switcher switch sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-3.3-r2

This will than upgrade the kernel and all the needed modules and add the entry to your grub.  Now at this point and time I would reboot and boot into the new kernel.  Once rebooted I would than:

equo install virtualbox-bin

The modules should pull, but if not:

equo install virtualbox-modules#`uname -r`

Continue On

depmod -a

modprobe vboxdrv

modprobe vboxnetadp

modprobe vboxnetflt

usermod -a -G vboxusers YOUR_USER_NAME

Now go ahead and log out and than log back in so the changes can be applied.

To get virtualbox modules to load automatically:

    # nano /etc/conf.d/modules

add to it:

    modules="vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp"

then save and exit, reboot.

Once you have Virtualbox installed you won’t have to worry about pulling kernels, it’s just that initial install and if there is a new kernel available scenario.  If one had downloaded and install Sabayon 8 and installed Virtualbox before kernel 3.3 came out, one would never of had to fuss with a different kernel.

The only thing we are really doing that the wiki doesn’t cover is switching the kernel first.  Why do I recommend using kernel-switcher vs just installing it all with equo install virtualbox-bin?  The main thing is, you’re changing kernels so I want to keep that process simple and smooth vs pulling it and doing a bunch of updates along side it.  In theory both methods should work, I just want to take the extra step and make sure it goes right.