Virtualbox is a virtualization tool. Virtualbox supports different operating system families and operating systems like Windows, Windows Server, Linux, Kali, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Solaris, OS X, etc. Virtualbox is a free and opensource project. It can get without any fee or payment. But Oracle mainly supports the development of the Virtualbox.

Virtualbox provides a lot of features of popular virtualization technology Vmware. It supports 3D graphics which is very useful for GUI based virtualization. Virtualbox also used headless which means without opening GUI. Virtualbox is mainly used by desktop users. It generally not well suited to enterprise environments. Because there are some performance bottle if multiple virtual machines are running on the same system. Also, enterprise environments need more scale-able, API supported virtualization technologies like Vmware, Linux KVM, Hyper-V.

Download

The following page provides the Virtualbox installation application download. Select according to your system and version below.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

OR

Alternatively, download can be done with a command-line interface with the wget like below. Keep in mind the link can be changed after some time.

$ wget "http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.1.14/virtualbox-5.1_5.1.14-112924~Ubuntu~yakkety_am
d64.deb"

Our host system is Ubuntu 16.10 . Our system information can get with the following command.

$ cat /etc/lsb-release

We have chosen virtualbox-5.1_5.1.14-112924~Ubuntu~yakkety_amd64.deb because the latest and similar version to our host system is this.

Installation

Installation is very easy. Easier than Windows application. Just run dpkg command like below for installation. This will automatically unpack files in the downloaded package and install them and then will arrange the required services. Installing requires root privileges. Root privileges can be provided with the sudo command.

$ sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-5.1_5.1.14-112924~Ubuntu~yakkety_amd64.deb

Start Virtualbox

After installation is completed without any errors. Virtualbox can be started in different ways. One of them is calling virtualbox command.

$ virtualbox

OR

We can start VirtualBox from the system menu. This menu can be changed for different desktop environments. In this example we use KDE.