I am on an unfortunate text adventure getting to run VirtualBox 6.1.22 under Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS. My key problem is, that I had to upgrade my (shiny new) machine to Kernel 12.4 (shiny new graphics card and other hardware requiring a higher kernel...)
frank@p14:~$ uname -r
5.12.4-051204-generic
I followed the official Virtual Box instructions (adding to sources.list, adding key) and manage to install version 6.1.22, which explicitly supports Kernel 5.12..
( SecureBoot in BIOS is OFF. Just saying. )
The warning I get during install is:
This system is currently not set up to build kernel modules.
Please install the Linux kernel "header" files matching the current kernel
for adding new hardware support to the system.
The distribution packages containing the headers are probably:
linux-headers-generic linux-headers-5.12.4-051204-generic
...fair enough, and also upon starting $> virtualbox I get...
WARNING: The vboxdrv kernel module is not loaded. Either there is no module
available for the current kernel (5.12.4-051204-generic) or it failed to
load. Please recompile the kernel module and install it by
sudo /sbin/vboxconfig
You will not be able to start VMs until this problem is fixed.
...and indeed inside the Virtualbox GUI I can do little more than opening the 'about' box...
Those headers appear available here, very first link even:
**However they won't install without a libc6 2.33 **
Fiddling the hard way with libc6 versions sounds not like a good idea, or is it?
Are those “headers” available as a binary elsewhere? (my poor memories of C/C++ coding would tell me, that header files itself don't need compilation, but well in this context I have no clue what they are anyway...)
If this is the valid method to find out, I am on libc verison 2.31, so just two microversions below.
> ldd --version
> ldd (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.31-0ubuntu9.2) 2.31
So behaps I may dare upgrade? Or is this dangerous? Or fiddle with the header package (how?) to accept 2.31? (wildly guessing there is no vital feature hidden in that minor upgrade...)
Addendum
$> sudo apt install linux-headers-generic
linux-headers-generic is already the newest version (5.4.0.77.80).
...and /sbin/vboxconfig keeps complaining as above (since 5.4.0 is below 5.4.12).
Trying to install the required explicit version explicitly fails, but with some additional info:
sudo apt install linux-headers-5.12.4-051204-generic
...
Package linux-headers-5.12.4-051204-generic is not available,
but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been
obsoleted, or is only available from another source
Hmm... should I maybe add another repo to /etc/apt/sources.list ?
Any other suggestions?
