Upstream Virtualbox + openssl versions on mandriva

This is just a quick post which perhaps will help someone else besides me.

If you tried to install VirtualBox from its official binaries available at the official site on Mageia, you perhaps have realized that it won’t install itself due to a missing libcrypto.so.0.9.8.

Where this library comes from? Let’s go for a bit of history of openssl in latest Mandriva releases..

Back in pre-Mandriva-2010.1 era, I was the one responsible for upgrading openssl library to the official 1.0.0 release, which was released after almost a decade of development. And according to Mandriva library policy, which allows multiple libraries with different major versions to coexist, this resulted in having available both libopenssl1.0.0-version-release.rpm and libopenssl0.9.8-version-release.rpm, which was carried out from the old build. It was still kept for backward-compatibility issues, and also for third-party packages compatibilities (as almost nobody has migrated to openssl 1.0.0 back then). And at some point, (almost) all of the Mandriva packages were rebuilt to use OpenSSL 1.0.0 libraries correctly.

However, this also resulted in the package libopenssl0.9.8 becoming orphan – it had no corresponsing .src.rpm in the repository, as the source rpm was providing only libopenssl1.0.0 library now. But as for binary package, it was left there, as there were additional applications requiring it.

When Mageia folks has forked the Mandriva repository, they did a correct think – they fully rebuilt all the packages from their source files, resulting in a complete, fully rebuildable and non-ambiguous repository. However, the libopenssl0.9.8 went missing in action – as it had no corresponding source package anymore, it became unavailable.

So finally, after almost a year since the openssl 1.0.0 migration, I’ve discovered one 3rd-party package which was still relying on openssl 0.9.8 to be available – Oracle’s VirtualBox packages. This is why such question arose.

There are many ways to solve this problem, ranging from creating a new package specifically for openssl0.9.8 (most ugly one), to creating dumb symlinks from libcrypto.so.1.0.0 to libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (most workaroundish and dangerous one), to persuading Oracle devs to build their VirtualBox packages on post-2010.1 Mandriva versions (most correct one), and so on.

However, I just took a simple route, and simple did

urpmi http://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/MandrivaLinux/devel/cooker/x86_64/media/main/release/lib64openssl0.9.8-0.9.8n-1mdv2010.1.x86_64.rpm.

(or, for 32bits installations):

urpmi http://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/MandrivaLinux/official/2010.1/i586/media/main/release/libopenssl0.9.8-0.9.8n-1mdv2010.1.i586.rpm

This is certainly not the right thing to do, but it works .