Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions in CentOS4

This one frustrated me enough that I have to post the solution.

At work we run RHEL4 on our production servers but with limited licences I decided to try CentOS4 for testing. I’d been mucking around with VirtualBox and as my test hardware had died I decided to try it.

When it came to installing the Guest Additions I hit a roadblock. I followed the instructions for installing the headers:

yum install kernel-devel

…but that wasn’t working. I was still getting:

Please install the build and header files for your current Linux kernel.

The trick is to create the default symbolic link to the header files:

ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-92.1.18.el5-i686 /usr/src/linux

Problem solved by jeffreywt on the VirtualBox Forums.

One thought on “Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions in CentOS4

  1. Just remember that when I create the symlink, I did it for my particular kernel version. As we are now on CentOS 5.4, the kernel version is a bit different in the ln -s command.

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