Fedora Core 20 and Virtualbox

I liked Fedora Core 20's interface.  I think it's right up there with Ubuntu's unity.  Unfortunately, it seems as my HP laptop cannot really run what I need to run from my backed up Virtualbox install.  So, I will be purging this and installing Ubuntu 12.10 which was the last Ubuntu release that was very problem free on this laptop.  Anyway, this blog post details the issues I came across while getting my backed up Virtualbox image to work.  More after the jump!

So, the first thing to do is to backup the VM from my original host OS.  This can be found in the VirtualBox VMs folder.  I then proceeded to download Virtualbox's FC rpm.  This installed without incident or seemingly so.  I also downloaded and installed the guest additions, but did not realize until later I had missed a vital step from this out of the box installation.

Reintroducing the VM was as simple as putting the VM folder where Virtualbox expects them.  Then, use the "Add" menu option to load the .vbox file inside the VM folder.  That's when the problems started creeping up.

The first issue I encountered was that Virtualbox kept crashing when I tried to run the VM.  Turns out I had forgotten to install the Linux kernel source and headers that VM required.  Of course!  I did the following:

$ sudo yum install rpmdevtools yum-utils

$ sudo yum install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers dkms make bzip2 perl

$ sudo yum update kernel*

*note: reboot to get new kernel version loaded*

$ KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`

$ export KERN_DIR

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

As a bonus, I also got the yum repository file from here and placed it in /etc/yum.repos.d/ folder.  Then run sudo yum update to pull in from the repository.

The next issue is the missing AMD-V virtualization support which was disabled on BIOS.  I had to reboot and enable Virtualization Support.  Virtualbox then ran without issues except that it choked on Oracle and other stuff.  So, this pretty much ends my involvement with Fedora as of now.  The new desktop seems really good however.  Too bad, fglrx support is broken in Fedora Core 20.