Debian 7.3.0 (Wheezy) in VirtualBox

Posted by Nate Bargmann on Thu, Jan 23, 2014

To test a software build I installed Debian 7.3.0, a.k.a. Wheezy, into a VirtualBox drive.  All seemed well except the VirtualBox Guest additions did not seem to be active as a shared directory to the host computer could not be mounted.  In Aptitude the necessary guest packages were installed and attempting to rebuild the virtualbox-guest-dkms failed by stating that no kernel source was installed.  A bit of investigation revealed that a 486 version of the linux-image package was installed but the 686 kernel headers were installed.  D’oh!  Seems the Debian installer chose the safe kernel but the dkms package recommends the 686 kernel headers.

I chose to install the 686-pae image and set VirtualBox to enable PAE and I was on my way.  It was a bit of a head scratcher for a few minutes.