Centos – How to solve “building the main Guest Additions module Failed”

centoscompilingkernel-modulessoftware installationvirtualbox

I tried to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions module in a VM guest running CentOS but I get this error message when everything else was okay:

building the main Guest Additions module Failed

Since I'm very new to CentOS and VirtualBox, I have no idea about to solve this and wasnt able to find any solution searching the internet (the only post I found didn't help me).

Here is the log:

/usr/src/vboxguest-4.1.14/vboxguest/build_in_tmp: line 55: make :
command not found Creating user for the Guest additions. Creating udev
rule for the Guest additions kernel module

Best Answer

You lack the make command. Make is a utility that is often used to build programs from source; it runs the compiler on every source file in the right order. You need to install the make package, and possibly others: the C compiler, and the kernel headers (files generated during the compilation of the Linux kernel, that are necessary to compile third-party modules).

I hardly ever use CentOS, but I think the right command is:

yum install gcc make kernel-devel

or (will install more than you need)

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

You may need to install other packages as well.

You need to run this command as root; depending on whether you use su or sudo:

su -c 'yum install …'
sudo yum install …
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