Building VirtualBox is getting harder and harder these days as Oracle add non-standard hacky little scripts to the codebase, just like their horrible database installation that requires you to install RPM’s to allow the installer to run, then you must remove them afterwards or your entire system will be un-upgradeable!

The build instructions here are hideously out-of-date and don’t really help much on a non-Debian system.

The first bug was a dependency on a specific version of Java, or more accurately a hardcoded location for the JRE. The fix for that was a symlink for OpenJDK, not installing the Sun JVM as they said. So as root:

cd /usr/lib/jvm/
ln -s java-1.6.0-openjdk.x86_64 java-6-openjdk

Another problem I had was that they silently started building the packages using makeself, which became a requirement, even if you used ./configure --disable-hardening, which is not supposed to build distributable packages. makeself is not packaged, so just untar it in /usr/local/bin/ as root.

Recently it seems they’ve added to the mix, compiling the UserManual.pdf using LaTeX and an obscure font. The fix for that appears to be to download and install the font, as root:

cd /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/
mkdir bera
cd bera/
wget http://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/bera/beramono.sty
texhash

They’ve removed compiling the VBoxFixHDD utility as I suggested (as the code wasn’t in SVN, but the dependency was!) by commenting out line 53 of vbox/src/VBox/Devices/Storage/testcase/Makefile.kmk

#PROGRAMS += VBoxFixHdd

So OSE revision 32218 (newer than PUEL 3.2.8) now compiles on 64-Bit Fedora 13 again. There doesn’t appear to be anything hugely new, other than a redesigned GUI with a preview window.