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Comment by herge | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have as many problems as I have with virtualbox, vagrant and Ubuntu 16.04 as a guest OS? I would expect it to be one of the most common Linux versions running in vbox now a days as it's the latest LTS.

Nonetheless, I have had all sorts of issues with trying to tie my 16.04 box to a specific private network IPs.

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I've been maintaining a popular 16.04 box for VMware and VirtualBox, and it hasn't been easy: https://github.com/geerlingguy/packer-ubuntu-1604

I finally have it stable on VirtualBox (5.0 or 5.1.x), but now am having issues with VMware 8.5, go figure. The boxes published on Atlas are all stable and working with any recent version of VirtualBox or VMware Fusion, though: https://vagrantcloud.com/geerlingguy/boxes/ubuntu1604

I was about to say, the geerlingguy boxes are the only ones that work for me. Thanks for all the work!

Sure thing! I'm actually uploading a new box based on 5.1.8 today. Should be available in Atlas soon!

And thank you massively for that work!

What have your biggest issues been?

Networking at first, then open VM tools integration, and now something with VMware Fusion 8.5... still trying to figure out what's going wrong this time :/

The CentOS 6 and 7 boxes I maintain have been quite stable forever; each Ubuntu release seems to carry some lurking demons that pop up in random Packer, Ubuntu, Vagrant, VirtualBox or VMware updates.

<nod> I ask because I have a bevy of 14.04LTS installs (bare metal), and have never had any issues running same in VBox. 16.x and its systemd move has left me quite uninspired, so wondered if anything was due to that.

Thanks

Something to watch out for is that vagrant does not always (most of the times really) work with the latest release of virtualbox. Try skimming through the documentation of vagrant and they'll say what versions of virtualbox they support. By using the version they say should work, I have no problems (and I'm on 16.04 as well)

I tried setting up with Vagrant once. Gave up since I rarely ever have to spin up new VM's enough (and my preferred distro is now Arch) to actually get with it, although I might take a second shot.

IIRC though Vagrant requires that you keep the default NAT configured which can make configuring networking on a VM client rather difficult in VBox.

Overall, I have had enough unnecessarily poor experiences with both Virtualbox and Ubuntu that I try to not use them in general, fwiw. I don't use Vagrant so I don't have recommendations for that specific case, I'm sorry.

Ive had no issues with that exact setup with Windows host. Must run vagrant up as admin for symlinks to work is all that's been bothersome.

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