VirtualBox Install On Debian 12

What is VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a free and open source Type-2 hypervisor owned and maintained by Oracle. A Type-2 hypervisor means it runs as an application on an operating system. This means you can run VirtualBox on your Linux, Mac, or Windows computer. In this post, we will install VirtualBox on Debian 12. If you’re following along and you are not running Debian 12, don’t worry! These instructions should work on all Debian-based linux distributions.

Installing VirtualBox

Step 1

Check and install any updates

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Step 2

Install required packages

sudo apt install gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms -y

Step 3

Add the Oracle VirtualBox public key

curl https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor --yes --output /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/vbox.gpg

Step 4

Add the Oracle VirtualBox repository

echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian bookworm contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

Step 5

Update the repositories and install the latest version of VirtualBox

sudo apt update && sudo apt install virtualbox-7.0 -y

Step 7

Add your current username to the vboxusers users group

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers $USER

Wrapping Up

We are now ready to start building virtual machines using VirtualBox. I hope you found this short install guide helpful.

Stay curious,

-Brian

Helpful Links https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#install-linux-host