Installing VirtualBox 2 on a Linux Host

This chapter of VirtualBox 2 Essentials covers the requirements for and steps to install VirtualBox on a Linux host.

VirtualBox Linux Host Requirements

Before embarking on an installation of VirtualBox on a Linux host, there a couple of pre-requisites. The following packages are required if access to the VirtualBox graphical interface is required. If only the headless VRDP server is required, the following packages are not mandated:

• Qt toolkit - Version 4.3.0 or newer of the Qt toolkit must be installed.

• SDL - Version 1.2.7 or newer of the libsdl graphics library must be installed.

Another, optional package is Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS). Whilst not required to install and run VirtualBox the presence of this package will ease the transition to future kernel updates. When installed, DKMS ensures that the VirtualBox kernel module is rebuilt automatically when the Linux kernel is updated. Without this package, the VirtualBox kernel module will need to be rebuilt manually each time a kernel update is applied to the host system

The DKMS package may be installed as follows:

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install dkms

Fedora:

su
yum install dkms

Mandriva:

urpmi dkms

In addition to the above requirements, USB device support requires that the user account from which VirtualBox is running have read and write access to the usbfs USB filesystem. Also, if the virtual machines will be required to have access to host network adapters, the user must also have aread and write access to the /dev/net/tun device.