VirtualBox on Fedora 15

May 30, 2011

fedora, virtualbox

This is what I did to install Oracle VM VirtualBox on a new Fedora 15 installation.

The documentation at the bottom of download page VirtualBox for Linux gives you the repos-file for yum on Fedora. Find the repos-file and save it to /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo, it should look like this:

  
\[virtualbox\]  
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch - VirtualBox  
baseurl=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/$releasever/$basearch  
enabled=1  
gpgcheck=1  
gpgkey=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc  

Then you can search for VirtualBox:

  
\[root@favela ~\]# yum search VirtualBox  
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit  
\=========================== N/S Matched: VirtualBox ============================  
VirtualBox-4.0.x86_64 : Oracle VM VirtualBox  
  
  Name and summary matches only, use "search all" for everything.  

To install:

  
yum install VirtualBox-4.0.x86_64  

Users need to be included in the OS group vboxusers before they can run it:

  
usermod -a -G vboxusers oisene  

VirtualBox is now ready to run from menu.

In fact this was not what I did first time, because I didn’t read the fine manual to the end. I download it from here and installed the missing packages something like this:

  
yum install qt qt-x11 SDL  
yum install kernel-headers-$(uname -r) kernel-devel-$(uname -r)  
yum install binutils gcc patch glibc-headers glibc-devel  
yum install dkms  
rpm -ip /home/oisene/Downloads/VirtualBox-4.0-4.0.8_71778_fedora15-1.x86_64.rpm   

Without the dkms package VirtualBox will run, but it is recommended to ensure VirtualBox host kernel modules will be update during next kernel update.