Start Virtualbox VM automatically

[ktz84]

OK moved to Plan B. Teamviewer and remotely logging into the host GUI to start it through the VirtualBox Manager GUI. Would still like to resolve this however at least I have something workable.

[ajgreeny]

Just recently, at evey kernel update I get that missing vboxdrv error and have to run the

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

command, even though I have dkms installed on the host machine. This has only started with the past couple of versions of VBox, so I assume it has something to do with these recent versions.

I haven't bothered to look for any solution to this as it is frankly quicker just to run the setup command as shown rather than spend time searching, but I run VBox only on a local machine, and not as a server, so it is not important to me; I'm just looking a development versions of *ubuntu OSs for the sake of interest only.

[ktz84]

I've seen that message too and in the past I was able to run the suggested command however when I run it now I'm getting:

sudo: /etc/init.d/vboxdrv: command not found

So not sure what's going on now.

[TheFu]

It needs to run under your userid, with YOUR environment. Using any other userid will not work. That is what the su -l userid is supposed to handle. Perhaps I didn't RTFM correctly and missed the needed option for su? Please check my work.

It needs to run under your userid, with YOUR environment. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables rc.local doesn't have much environment - for vboxmanage to do what you want with the correct userid AND with the correct environment - that needs to be set BEFORE calling the program.

To see the differences in environments:

a) env > ~/normal.env
b) put env > /home/the-userid-home/rc-local.env into the /etc/rc.local file and reboot.

Compare the to files - I'd use meld for this ---- meld ~/normal.env ~/rc-local.env, but diff and sdiff work too.
See all those differences? Anything jump out at missing that would impact virtualbox? Is HOME set? That's a big one.

[sergio38]

What I add in my user's crontab is the following:

@reboot /usr/bin/VBoxManage startvm "NameOfTheVM" --type headless &