hey, virtualbox – don’t be retarded

Ran across this error recently in an Ubuntu guest on my VirtualBox install: VBoxClient: (seamless): failed to start, Stage: Setting guest IRQ filter mask Error: VERR_INTERNAL_ERROR

Gee, isn’t that a useful message.

Fortunately, there was a forums.virtualbox thread on just this error.

The upshot is that this error is actually caused because of a failure during the initial install of the {{VirtualBox}} Guest Additions.

In the middle of what looks like, at quick glance, a successful GA installation, is this nugget: Please install the gcc make perl packages from your distribution.

The GA installer can’t compile kernel modules without a compiler.

And that makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that this error is even possible to get! The GA installer must run as root (or via sudo).

If those package are missing, the installer should stop what it’s doing, ask the user if they want to install these packages (because without them the GA installer won’t install everything), and then when the user invariably answers “yes” (because – duh! – why wouldn’t they want this to work?), go run an apt -y install gcc make perl.

But is that what {{Oracle}} in their infinite wisdom decide to do?

No. They decided it’s better to just quietly report in the middle of a bunch of success statements that “oh, by the way – couldn’t actually do what you wanted, but if you don’t notice, you’re going to spend hours on {{Google}} trying to figure it out”.

Morons.

It realy isn’t that hard to make human-friendly error messages … nor to even try to pre-solve the error condition you found!