Virtualbox

I’m a bit of a VirtualBox fan; there are a few cases where I need to run Windows and virtualization is just the ticket for such occasions. Recently, though, I ran into two small problems getting things working like I needed them.

1. Installing Java.

This was pretty strange because both Java and VirtualBox are from Sun, so I really wasn’t expecting a problem. I needed to run a Windows application that required Java. I downloaded the latest version (Version 6 Update 13) and attempted several times to install. No matter what I tried, the installer always “rolled back” the installation with an error about the “wizard was interrupted”.

Finally, I decided to try an older version of Java (Version 6), and it installed just fine – it detected that updates were available, but again the installation failed. Sad, but for my particular purposes right now, the older version of Java works so good enough.

2. Updating VirtualBox

During all this a newer version of VirtualBox was released (2.2.0 – Changelog), and I wanted to upgrade. However, this process failed as well with an error like so:

sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-2.2_2.2.0-45846_Ubuntu_intrepid_amd64.deb
dpkg: regarding virtualbox-2.2_2.2.0-45846_Ubuntu_intrepid_amd64.deb containing virtualbox-2.2:
 virtualbox-2.2 conflicts with virtualbox
  virtualbox-2.1 provides virtualbox and is present and installed.
dpkg: error processing virtualbox-2.2_2.2.0-45846_Ubuntu_intrepid_amd64.deb (--install):
 conflicting packages - not installing virtualbox-2.2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 virtualbox-2.2_2.2.0-45846_Ubuntu_intrepid_amd64.deb

The solution here was to first specifically uninstall the earlier version, and then install the newer:

sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-2.1

After this, the latest version of VirtualBox was up and running – and it still couldn’t take the Java Version 6 Update 13 installation.

As an aside, there’s always been a strange “virtualbox” package that I have never been able to fully uninstall. I’m not sure how this situation came about, it might be from earlier trials of different versions/sources of VirtualBox, but I’m not sure.