VirtualBox 6.1.18 on Bullseye?

[pwzhangzz]

Has anyone ever successfully installed VirtualBox 6.1.18 on Bullseye? I tried several options all failed.

[Bloom]

No. There are dependency problems and Oracle doesn't seem to want to fix them.

I switched to KVM/QEMU with LibVirt and virt-manager. Works flawlessly and I never looked back.
See https://wiki.debian.org/KVM

[peer]

I also switched to KVM/QEMU from virtualbox a few months ago.

[quixote]

After days of searching and sort-of-blowing-up-apt (dangling broken dependencies ), I finally found something on youtube, of all places, by Amine Tech. Whether it works for you depends on whether version 6.1.16 is good enough, since the latest now is 6.1.18.

The secret is that Virtualbox has a generic linux version at the Oracle site. Continue down that page to the end of the "Linux Distributions" until you get to "all distributions." Download the installer on that line.

Then execute the following:

Code: Select all

S sudo apt install build-essential linux-headers-amd64
$ cd Downloads/        #or wherever the .run file was put
$ sudo chmod +x VirtualBox*.run     #previously downloaded from Oracle --> "For all distributions" so does not depend on the problematic libs
$ sudo ./VirtualBox*.run
$ vboxversion=$(wget -qO - https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/LATEST.TXT)
$ wget "https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/${vboxversion}/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-${vboxversion}.vbox-extpack"
$ sudo vboxmanage extpack install --replace Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-${vboxversion}.vbox-extpack
$ sudo usermod -aG vboxusers [username]


And then reboot.

One maybe-not-minor wrinkle: LATEST.TXT now points to version 6.1.18. So the extension pack is a minor version ahead of the virtualbox itself. It didn't cause a problem on my system. Yet, anyway.

Hope it works for you too

[drasar]

Yes, I'm using VB on Bullseye. Just setup APT pinning from unstable (where VB is available in the repo).

My config is:

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# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unstable.list
deb http://ftp.cz.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib

# cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/limit-unstable
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 100

Then you will be able to install packages from unstable:

Code: Select all

# apt-get update
# apt-get install virtualbox-qt

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Just setup APT pinning from unstable

If the VB package in sid moves to a higher glibc version dependency than is available in bullseye (which is likely at some point) then that method can break your system in a very fundamental way.

[drasar]

Just setup APT pinning from unstable

If the VB package in sid moves to a higher glibc version dependency than is available in bullseye (which is likely at some point) then that method can break your system in a very fundamental way.

If there a dependency issue occurs with the new version, then you can temporarily stay (days, max weeks) with the currently installed VB version until new dependencies are available also in the testing.

I'm using this configuration over a year and no issues except above observed.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I'm using this configuration over a year and no issues except above observed

Yes and bullseye has been testing for all of that time, which only lags unstable by about two weeks. That situation will change radically when bullseye is released as Debian 11 in a few months time.