Virtualbox could not find X.org or XFree86
At work we have Windows workstations, but we develop for Linux (don't
ask; in my previous mission in another MegaCorp we had a similar setup
for admining Linux servers...). We have access to devel machines via
ssh
and Samba, but the setup is laughable. I won't go too much into
details because it's embarrassing and because I signed some kind of NDA
somewhere.
Thing is, I setup a VM with VirtualBox in my workstation, installing a barebones Debian Sid. To have better integration with the Windows host I decided to install the VBox Linux Additions, but for some reason it was not setting up the video side of it. The error message is the one from the title:
Could not find X.org or XFree86 on the guest system. The X Window drivers will not be installed.
Thanks to this post I managed to quickly find out the reason. The step that actually tests and installs the x.org drivers is called like this:
/etc/init.d/vboxadd-x11 setup
If you run it with sh -x
you will find out that it actually tests two
things: the existence of /usr/lib/xorg/modules
, which you can either
create or just install the xserver-xorg-video-vesa
package, and it
tries to run X
, which you will find in the xserver-xorg
package.
So, TL;DR version: Just install these two packages:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg
Now all works.