Fedora in Oracle VM VirtualBox: installing guest additions

Question

What are the pros and conses of two method of installing VirtualBox guest additions:

• via the Devices -> Install Guest Additions...;
• via su -c 'yum install VirtualBox-guest' from rpmfusion repository.

Answer 1

Not sure why use a 3rd party repo when Vbox provides the way to do it.

But:

• VBox will compile the module to match your running kernel, in case of Fedora kernel update you just need to rerun the service for configuration: /etc/init.t/vboxadd setup

• VBox installation will require extra pkg's like kernel-devel, kernel-header, glibc-devel, gcc and 3 or 4 more, when the compilation fails you can check the log to know what it the missing file and perform yum whatprovides ; yum install

• Fusion repo: will give provide you with dependencies but it will not provide you with the latest stable build ( I do not agree with Lennon on this one ). If there is a new version and you happen to update it nothing tells you that fusion repo will be updating their repo at the same time as fedora releases the update.

• Using the fusion repo, you might actually have to install extra pkgs that are fusion based (extra space on hdd that you might avoid, unless you have other stuff from them )

For me and what I actually do, I install Fedora, run yum -y update and after being update I just run install guest additions (resolving by myself the dependencies). When a new kernel comes out and after updating the system, I just run /etc/init.t/vboxadd setup.

Answer 2

I would prefer YUM installation compared to a GUI installation.

Do note that :

Using the rpmfusion repo will helps you to resolve potential dependencies and give you the latest stable build.