/vagrant mount fix for Ubuntu VMs for Vagrant 1.5.1, Virtualbox 4.3.10 on OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks

When running Vagrant 1.5.1 with VirtualBox 4.3.10 on your shiny OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks, you may run into issue when trying to mount the /vagrant folder on Ubuntu VMs. The bug looks like

Failed to mount folders in Linux guest. This is usually because
the “vboxsf” file system is not available. Please verify that
the guest additions are properly installed in the guest and
can work properly. The command attempted was:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`getent group vagrant | cut -d: -f3` /vagrant /vagrant
mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`id -g vagrant` /vagrant /vagrant

This is a reported issue on both Vagrant and Virtualbox project and I believe the fault lies with VBoxGuestAdditions on the Virtualbox end. See Vagrant issue #3341 and Virtualbox issue #12879.

A fix was proposed to ssh into each and every Ubuntu VMs you got and perform the necessary symlink fix to get the VBoxGuestAdditions to work. This is quite clumsy in my opinion.

Here’s an alternative approach to the one liner symlink fix. This is based on the fixed VBoxGuestAdditions ISO as outlined in #12879.

Essentially boils down to copying the fixed ISO to the VirtualBox folder and letting vbguest plugin do its usual magic. Voila. Works for all ubuntu vms.


$ wget https://www.virtualbox.org/download/testcase/VBoxGuestAdditions_4.3.11-93070.iso

$ sudo cp VBoxGuestAdditions_4.3.11-93070.iso /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso


rst2pdf and rst2html5 on OS X 10.9.2 with XCode 5.1

This was almost the new nightmare on elm street scenario. But we got over it. Below are the complete steps to get rst2pdf and rst2html5 running on your sparkling new OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks.

Prerequisites

• XCode 5.1
• Homebrew 0.9.5

Steps


# install jpeg lib via homebrew
brew install libjpeg

# install pip via easy_install
sudo easy_install --upgrade pip

# install dependencies manually using the unused argument hack
sudo pip install --upgrade pdfrw

sudo pip install --upgrade Pygments

sudo ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install --upgrade reportlab

sudo ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install --allow-unverified PIL PIL

# install the bad boy
sudo pip install -U rst2pdf
sudo pip install -U rst2html5