VB 1.52, Cant apply partial context on unlabeled file installation errors

[Paul Moss]

Centos 5 and Fedora 7.

Basic installation of servers, no X installed. As server running headless.

Yum update and yum -y install which make kernel-devel gcc compat-libstdc++-33 qt SDL libIDL-2.so.0 libXt.so.6 (for the dependencies)

[root@centossrv tmp]# rpm -i VirtualBox-1.5.2_25433_rhel5-1.i586.rpm

chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox

chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxSDL

chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxVRDP

Creating group 'vboxusers'. VM users must be member of that group!

No precompiled module for this kernel found -- trying to build one. Messages emitted during module compilation will be logged to /var/log/vbox-install.log.

Success!

[SeijiSensei]

I got this error, too. Do you happen to have SELinux disabled, as I do? (If you're not sure, read the file /etc/sysconfig/selinux.) RedHat-flavored distros enable SELinux by default.

I looked into the chcon command which generates the "can't apply partial context" error. According to the man page, chcon is used to change the "security context" of a file. Since VirtualBox installs a kernel module, I wouldn't be surprised if the installer has to call chcon to make everything conform to SELinux. I bet it's pretty easy for chcon to throw an error if it's used when SELinux is disabled.

Proposed Bug Fix Have the installer examine the environment variable SELINUX to see if it is DISABLED before attempting to use chcon. If necessary, grep SELINUX= in /etc/sysconfig/selinux. You might want to avoid using chcon when it's set to PERMISSIVE as well, but that's more of a judgement call. Or, you could just capture syserr when using chcon.

[Frank Mehnert]

This SELinux issue was fixed some versions ago, closing.