dear Thaddeus,

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017, Thaddeus Nielsen wrote:

>     Greetings!  I have been using Devuan Jessie 1.0 Beta2 for nearly
> two months.  I regularly update the system.  Once I had virtualbox
> running fine but then removed it.  Since then the kernel has been
> upgraded at least twice.  I have reinstalled virtualbox and all the
> components are working except virtualbox-dkms fails to build.

this is due to the fact virtualbox has introduced new distro checks
that are ignoring the existance of devuan.

the quick solution is

# ln -s /etc/devuan_version /etc/debian_version

the lenghty solution is to send a patch to virtualbox developers
adding devuan to the check right before or after debian.

the we-are-not-so-sure solution is to add to our base-files package
this symlink OR an additional /etc/debian_release containing the
corresponding base distro we use, OR something else we may come up
with.

If there are expert opinions on this issue, I'd like to debate the
third solution and perhaps act upon it since this problem does affects
also other packages.

ciao