Uninstalling the default Virtualbox OSE Guest Additions on Debian

There’s already a pretty awesome guide for installing guest additions on debian: Installing Guest Additions on Debian

However, when you are just ready to run VBoxLinuxAdditions.run, you get a pretty scary warning message:

You appear to have a version of the VBoxGuestAdditions software on your system which was installed from a different source or using a different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before installing this version. If this is simply and older or a damaged installation you may safely proceed.

Do you wish to continue anyway? [yes or no]

A pre-installed VBoxGuestAdditions is so bad that it would be safer if you had a damaged installation. Wut?

For the longest time this was a mystery to me. I would just install it and when virtual box did glitchy things I couldn’t be sure if it was because I hadn’t properly removed the pre-installed guest additions.

Well you don’t need to worry cuz I’ve got this figured out. Lol. I might be saving you from a glitchy Virtual Box experience.

dpkg -l

Yea. Well it turns out you can get a list of all installed packages (at least the ones that dpkg/apt-get knows about) by running dpkg -l. In particular, if you run,

dpkg -l | grep virtualbox-ose-guest

You might get:

... virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms ...
... virtualbox-ose-guest-utils ...
... virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 ...

So I ran:

apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-ose-guest-x11
apt-get autoremove
apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-ose-guest-utils
#apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-dkms

I put in the `apt-get autoremove` in there because removing virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 gets you some xserver related packages; I’ve been running a purely commandline version, so autoremove got rid of any unnecessary xserver stuff.

I commented out the last one (with -dkms) because, when you try to run it, it will just tell you that it’s not there anymore. Maybe it’s because of the –purge option. Maybe.

Anyway if you proceed now, I don’t think you’ll get the same complaint.

Just to make sure, run (I just copied the directions from here)

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install build-essential module-assistant
m-a prepare # again. Well I had to.
mount /media/cdrom # if you hadn't already
sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

And it works like a charm for me.