Fixing VirtualBox Guest Additions in Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10)

I’ve read several posts on how to fix a broken VirtualBox Guest Additions installation after upgrading to Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (version 10.10) from Lucid, but these didn’t work for me, as they were missing a simple step.

If you’re running Maverick in a VirtualBox virtual machine, and your guest additions aren’t working, boot into your installation and enter these commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-*
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11
sudo reboot

Note: the second step above (“apt-get remove virtualbox-*“) is the one missing from current instructions: you’ll need to run this on upgraded VirtualBox hosts in order to remove all existing VirtualBox guest VM packages, and so that when you later install the necessary, updated versions, you ensure that there aren’t any conflicting installed packages.

You may need to enter your password and verify the package removal and installations interactively.

Installing the package virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 will also install -guest-dkms and -guest-utils as additional dependencies.