Creating sandbox machines under VirtualBox on my Win 7 Pro x86-64 desktop.
I've built and deleted scores of VM's running OL 5.7 and had no problems. At the point of configuring VBox Guest Additions, their instructions said to install (yum) a package called 'kernel-devel'. When I first started with VBox (migrating from VMworkstation) that didn't work and after a struggle with the VBox forum came up with package 'kernel-uek-devel-$(uname-r)'. Obviously the full package name gets completed when the shell expands $(uname -r).
Well, that made some sense, especially when I compared that to what I saw with 'uname -a':
[root@vblnxsrv02 ~]# uname -a
Linux vblnxsrv02.vbdomain 2.6.32-200.13.1.el5uek #1 SMP Wed Jul 27 21:02:33 EDT 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@vblnxsrv02 ~]#
But now I have a need to create a VM with OL 5.6. On that machine I see
[root@vblnxsrv01 cdrom]# uname -a
Linux vblnxsrv01.vbdomain 2.6.32-100.26.2.el5 #1 SMP Tue Jan 18 20:11:49 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@vblnxsrv01 cdrom]#
Note the lack of reference to 'uek'. So ... I figured that the package to install would be 'kernel-devel-$(uname-r)'. But that resulted in
No package kernel-devel-2.6.32-100.26.2.el5 available.
Nothing to do
After several trials and some more help from the VBox forum, I finally tried adding the uek spec to the package name.
[root@vblnxsrv01 cdrom]# yum -y install kernel-uek-devel-$(uname -r)
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
This system is not registered with ULN.
ULN support will be disabled.
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package kernel-uek-devel.x86_64 0:2.6.32-100.26.2.el5 set to be updated
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
After which the GA installation worked as expected.
So, with all that background, I'm wondering why 5.6 does not report 'uek' and 5.7 does, and they both need the 'uek' package for VBox guest additions. Dealing with kernel issues is a couple of layers of abstraction below where I normally work and so am not versed in the minutia there. On neither the 5.7 nor the 5.6 did I do anything beyond simply install from the downloaded .iso file.