Ubuntu World: Installing VirtualBox on Ubuntu

Installing VirtualBox From Precompiled Binaries

The VirtualBox binaries can be downloaded from here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. If the PUEL license is ok for you and there's a package for your distribution, you can install that package. For example, there is a VirtualBox .deb package for Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), so if you use Ubuntu 6.10, you can use that package. I've also tested this package successfully on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), so it seems you can use that package there, too.

To install the VirtualBox .deb package, please open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and become root:

sudo su

Then install some prerequisites for VirtualBox:

apt-get install bcc iasl xsltproc xalan libxalan110-dev uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev libasound2-dev libstdc++5 linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

Then go to the VirtualBox download page and pick the right .deb package for your Ubuntu version and download it to your system:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.3.8/VirtualBox_1.3.8_Ubuntu_edgy_i386.deb

After the download has finished, you can install VirtualBox like this:

dpkg -i VirtualBox_1.3.8_Ubuntu_edgy_i386.deb

You might get asked the following questions:
Do you agree with the PUEL license terms? <-- Yes
Should the vboxdrv kernel module be compiled now? <-- Yes
That's it already. You can now find VirtualBox under Applications > System Tools:

2 Installing VirtualBox From The Sources

If InnoTek's PUEL license doesn't work for you and you prefer the GPL and/or there's no .deb package for your Ubuntu version, you can compile VirtualBox from the sources. The sources are released under the GPL.
To install VirtualBox from the sources, please open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and become root:

sudo su

Then install some prerequisites for VirtualBox:

We can download the latest VirtualBox sources from InnoTek's SVN repository; to do so, we must install subversion first:

apt-get install subversion

Next we download the VirtualBox sources to the /usr/src/virtualbox directory:

mkdir /usr/src/virtualbox
cd /usr/src/virtualbox
svn co http://virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk vbox

Then we compile VirtualBox as follows:

cd vbox
./configure
source ./env.sh
kmk all
cd out/linux.x86/release/bin/src
make
make install

Afterwards we load the vboxdrv kernel module and copy the VirtualBox files to appropriate locations on the disk:

cd ../
modprobe vboxdrv
echo vboxdrv >> /etc/modules

cp -prf *.so /usr/lib/
mkdir /usr/local/virtualbox
cp -prf * /usr/local/virtualbox/
ln -s /usr/local/virtualbox/VirtualBox /usr/local/bin/VirtualBox
ln -s /usr/local/virtualbox/VBoxSVC /usr/local/bin/VBoxSVC

Next we create the group vboxusers and add our desktop user (e.g. falko) to it:

groupadd vboxusers
usermod -G vboxusers -a falko

Now we must change the permissions of /dev/vboxdrv so that it can be accessed by the vboxusers group:

chmod 660 /dev/vboxdrv
chgrp vboxusers /dev/vboxdrv

In order to prevent that the permissions of /dev/vboxdrv are reset at boot time, we edit /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules and add the following line at the end of that file:

gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules

[...]
KERNEL=="vboxdrv",                        GROUP="vboxusers", MODE="0660"

That's it. Now all that is left to do is create a menu entry for VirtualBox. Right-click on Applications and select Edit Menus:

In the window that opens please select System Tools and then click on New Item:

In the Create Launcher window, please fill in the following details:

Type: Application
Name: VirtualBox
Command: VirtualBox (please take care about upper/lower case - this is a command, if you don't write it right, the application won't start)
Comment: You can fill in anything you like or leave it blank.

If you like, you can also select an icon for the new application, but this is no must.