After freshly installing Debian 8 into a VB, I was able to install the VB Guest Additions kind of “half”. The virtual graphic adapter was recognised correctly, but when starting Debian the message “VBoxClient: the VirtualBox kernel service is not running. Exiting.” was displayed. Afterwards, it was not possible to mount a virtualised USB device or a shared folder.
The problem was that the VB Guest Additions were not compiled successfully into the kernel due to missing header files.
Solution:
1) Make sure that the non FOSS repositories are added to the apt-get sources.
root@mentat:/# vi /etc/apt/sources.list ---> Add: ---> deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free ---> deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free root@mentat:/# apt-get update
2) Magic:
Install kernel headers: (sudo or su – root if sudo isn’t installed)
root@mentat:/# sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,')
If not installed when executing the above command, add ‘make’ and ‘gcc’ first:
root@mentat:/# sudo apt-get install gcc root@mentat:/# sudo apt-get install make
3) (Re)Install the Guest Additions:
root@mentat:/media/cdrom/# sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
4) Restart VM
Et zou!