I have installed CentOS 5.4 & am trying to install VirtualBox on it. To install VirtualBox I run the command:

yum localinstall path/Virtualbox.rpm

It runs through the dependency check & says everything is fine. It installs the rpm & then says that compiling of the kernel module failed & that VirtualBox will not start until this is fixed, & that the most like cause is that the kernel sources are not installed.

I have installed the kernel-devel package & have the kernel source tree located at /usr/src/kernel/2.6....

Any idea what I am doing wrong? Thanks

Kernel-devel - This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules against the kernel package. This is just a guess, but the last time I had a problem compiling kernel modules it was because I had the wrong kernel-devel package installed. I use Fedora and use a PAE kernel, but, I mistakenly installed the kernel-devel package instead of the kernel-PAE-devel package. If your on 32 bit I would check that first.

Thanks for replying. I have been poking around & read the Makefile in the src tree for Virtualbox & it said that the default path for kernel sources was /usr/src/linux whereas my kernel src tree was /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-164.9.1.el5 So I made a link /usr/src/linux pointing to /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-164.9.1.el5 & tried running /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup, which is what the messages about not finding the sources suggested. It tried to compile the module again & came up with a different error. So now I'll dig into that one. Thanks again.

Do you have kernel-headers installed as well? And run to see if you have correct versions. Also run to see what kernel is currently active, so see if you have kernel-devel and kernel-headers for that particular kernel version.

I installed VirtualBox rpm's on several CentOS boxes and I believe that is all you need.