Binary package hint: virtualbox-ose
After installing virtualbox-ose-2.0.2-dfsg-0ubuntu3 on Intrepid beta (amd64), VirtualBox doesn't work. When run from the commandline, it complains:
"Could not find VirtualBox installation. Please reinstall."
Looking at the actual virtualbox shell script which is being run, it's failing because /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg is missing. This file doesn't seem to be provided by any package on intrepid. I assume it was included in previous package versions, and there was just a packaging error that caused it to be missed from the current package, but its absence pretty much breaks VirtualBox.
DISCOVERIES (from Daniel):
virtualbox-2.1 (the "official", PUEL package) does the following in postinst:
if [ -f /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg ]; then
echo "Found old version of /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg, removing."
rm /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg
fi
Therefore, I think this problem happens when you install virtualbox-ose, then virtualbox-2.1 (or another package from virtualbox.org), _without_ purging virtualbox-ose before and afterwards re-install virtualbox-ose (which does not re-create the removed vbox.cfg file then).
I'm not sure how to address this though (maybe make sure during installation of virtualbox-ose that the file gets created always?) and it seems like a packaging issue with the official packages.
Just to add some more detail. /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg *should* be installed by virtualbox-ose (found using dpkg -S /etc/vbox/vbox.cf), but I don't know how to force it to install. Running sudo aptitude reinstall virtualbox-ose does not regenerate this file.
In order to get working eventually I had to manually extract the vbox.cfg file from the virtualbox-ose deb package, and copy it over myself.