VirtualBox 4.2 released

Version 4.2 of VirtualBox was released two days ago (so far for Linux only). Download it from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Probably not important, but I'm using Fedora 16 for the moment, and since I was running VirtualBox 4.1 I had to remove the previous package first and install the 4.2 version. This will not destroy the guest hosts.

rpm -e VirtualBox-4.1
rpm -ip VirtualBox-4.2-4.2.0_80737_fedora16-1.x86_64.rpm

After a new start with the VirtualBox Manager the old VM guests are in place.

VirtualBox on Fedora 15

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.