I have no problem installing VirtualBox and the related tools and extensions in Ubuntu and Arch. In Fedora, things are a little bit harder.
First, I think it’s better NOT to download binaries distributed by VirtualBox: I’m using Fedora packages that are available from RPM Fusion Free. Thus, first of all, you have to enable such a repository.
Then you run
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sudo dnf install VirtualBox virtualbox-guest-additions |
It’s also best to add your user to the VirtualBox group:
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sudo usermod -aG vboxusers ${USER} |
And reboot, of course.
Then, to have additional features, you should install the VirtualBox extension pack. That’s where Fedora gets complicated. Differently from Ubuntu (package virtualbox-ext-pack) and Arch (package virtualbox-ext-oracle), you will not find a corresponding package in the RPM Fusion repositories.
You need to download the file from the VirtualBox website manually, http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/. You must download a file of the shape Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-<VERSION>.vbox-extpack where <VERSION> must match the version of VirtualBox you installed. Then, you install it inside VirtualBox with File => Preferences => Extensions.
If the versions don’t match, you will have trouble starting your virtual machines with errors of the shape:
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The VM session was aborted. Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) ... |
I experienced such a problem and asked on the Fedora forum.
Then, I realized that VirtualBox had been upgraded during a system update, but I forgot to download and install the updated extension pack. You can see the versions don’t match:
I then downloaded the corresponding file http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.38/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-6.1.38.vbox-extpack. And added it to the “Extensions” preference (selecting “Upgrade”):
That was enough to go back to running my VirtualBox machines.
However, I must admit that the whole procedure for using VirtualBox in Fedora is much more cumbersome and error-prone than in other distributions 🙁 It’s far too easy in Fedora to forget about package upgrades that require manual interventions. In general, I’d like to avoid manual interventions at all 😉
Lorenzo, a useful summary and yes, I agree about Fedora being a bit of a pain in regard to the need for manual interventions. (I rely on a single ancient Windows app that I run in a Windows XP VM on VirtualBox … not ideal but all FOSS equivalents try to be too clever by a long way.) Presumably it would be possible to write a script to do the job of (a) checking installed version number, (b) downloading the appropriate extension pack, (c) installing it and (d) checking the integrity of the result. All the best, Stuart Brown (composer/arranger)
Thank you for the feedback!
To be honest, I mostly stopped using Fedora because it doesn’t work out of the box for most my tasks.
I also stopped using VirtualBox: as you can see, I posted several articles on KVM, QEMU and Virtual Machine Manager, which are much more powerful and efficient.