Setting up a VM for Raspberry Pi development using Virtualbox, Scratchbox2 & qemu (Part 2)
If you decided to use a Debian or Ubuntu based distro then when you booted the Raspberry Pi Development VM that you just created you will have probably noticed an error message flash on the screen saying
piix4_smbus 0000.00.07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade bios or use force_addr=0xaddr
and you'll want to fix that before doing anything else. The Fedora16 VM doesn't produce this error so Fedora users can skip straight to the guest addition installation instructions. I wrote a short post about this error last year but to save you having to go there to read that post the fix [Credit for that fix goes to http://finster.co.uk & Karl Foley] is:
- Start a terminal
- sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
- Add the line blacklist i2c_piix4 to the end of the file and save
- sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
- sudo reboot
There are just a couple of things you need to do before installing guest additions. No matter which distro you have chosen as your guest os for your Virtual Machine.
- Use your distributions update manager to install any updates released since the installation iso was created.
- install (if they haven't already been installed) gcc, kernel headers and other essential tools and utilities that compiling C programs require for your distribution. In Debian or Ubuntu you would open a terminal and type
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Fedora uses a program called yum instead of apt so for Fedora the command would be
sudo yum install gcc kernel-headers
[sudo allows you to run a command as root without actually knowing the root password if you have been authorized to do so. In Debian and Ubuntu the user you created at installation has already been authorized. in Fedora and other distributions this might not be the case so you'll have to lookup how to do this in the distributions documentation or on google or bing or your favourite search engine.]
When that has completed you should have a screen looking vaguely similar to the one below.
Click in the menu item labeled Devices
Select the Install Guest Additions menu entry
After a few seconds a CD icon will appear on your desktop and a dialog asking if you want to autorun the CD will popup
Click the OK button and a new dialog will open
A final dialog will popup asking you to enter your password
Enter your password and click the Authenticate button and after a few minutes you have a screen that looks similar (exact on Ubuntu, vaguely the same on Debian and Fedora and other distributions) to the following screenshot
Press enter to close the terminal. Right click the CD icon on the desktop and click eject
then reboot your Virtual Machine.
If everything went to plan then you'll now have a working VM with the ability to cut & paste between it and your host operating system, USB support, better graphics support (larger screen resolutions and 3d/2d acceleration...), shared folders between the VM and the host os and a few other bits and bobs. It is also now I do things like disabling the screen saver in the VM and changing the desktop and gdm wallpaper/splash screens but as they don't affect the purpose of the VM I won't document how to do that but will leave that for the user to discover how to do it.
This post was going to continue to the completion of the VM with Scratchbox2, qemu and a seed rootfs installed and configured but this post has gotten rather long so actually stop this post here and complete everything in a following post.
