Excellent: Install VirtualBox 6 on Debian 10

[Loci.Cantos]

There are some poorly considered procedures floating around the cloud for installing VirtualBox 6 on Buster. This link will take you to an excellent procedure for that process. It's clean and quick, and it worked perfectly. Good luck. Thank you to Josphat Mutai for making this available.

https://computingforgeeks.com/install-v ... tu-debian/

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I don't think adding Oracle's repositories is a good idea. I also don't think using VirtualBox is a good idea, it was removed from Debian stable because it isn't of sufficient quality.

[Loci.Cantos]

Thanks for the head-up, I didn't know this HoaS.

Does it cause problems for itself only (internally inconsistent), or does it cause problems across the system as well, affecting system operation and/or other applications?

Is there some alternative hypervisor? I've stayed mostly with vb over the years but I'm happy to look at others. Do you have any suggestions?

Thank you.

lc

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Does it cause problems for itself only (internally inconsistent), or does it cause problems across the system as well, affecting system operation and/or other applications?

Potentially both, the developers have a tendency to ignore security issues so it seems likely their packaging skills may be lacking.

Is there some alternative hypervisor?

KVM is native to Linux and is supported by QEMU. Or use gnome-boxes.

[Loci.Cantos]

Thank you. I will look into these now.

[stevepusser]

Well, you can get 6.0.10 from my OBS repo https://build.opensuse.org/project/show ... box-buster

I'll update it to 6.0.14 tomorrow, the same as is backported already for MX 19 and 17/18.

[kedaha]

Well, you can get 6.0.10 from my OBS repo https://build.opensuse.org/project/show ... box-buster

I'll update it to 6.0.14 tomorrow, the same as is backported already for MX 19 and 17/18.

That's good; it took a long time to build but I successfully backported 6.0.14 from sid to Buster:

I noticed when starting it via the terminal I got this:

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user@debian:~$ virtualbox
WARNING: The character device /dev/vboxdrv does not exist.
	 Please install the virtualbox-dkms package and the appropriate
	 headers, most likely linux-headers-amd64.

	 You will not be able to start VMs until this problem is fixed.

A little searching and I fixed it with:

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# dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms
# dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox
# modprobe vboxdrv

And it starts fine, with no errors.

[kedaha]

For anyone interested, this is how I backported VirtualBox 6.0.14 from sid to buster:
This simple method doesn't always work so, in general, I recommend stevepusser's repository because it's much quicker.
As always, to build a quick personal backport from unstable "sid" for one's own architecture, first edit or add the source to your /etc/apt/sources.list file with a command like (modify for your mirror):

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# echo "deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update

Now as your user (not root);

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$ mkdir BUILD && cd BUILD
user@debian:~/BUILD$ apt-get -b virtualbox

ls command will show the resulting backported packages:

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user@debian:~/BUILD$ ls
virtualbox-6.0.14-dfsg
virtualbox_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.buildinfo
virtualbox_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.changes
virtualbox_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox_6.0.14-dfsg-2.debian.tar.xz
virtualbox_6.0.14-dfsg-2.dsc
virtualbox_6.0.14-dfsg.orig.tar.xz
virtualbox-dbgsym_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-dkms_6.0.14-dfsg-2_all.deb
virtualbox-guest-dkms_6.0.14-dfsg-2_all.deb
virtualbox-guest-source_6.0.14-dfsg-2_all.deb
virtualbox-guest-utils_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-guest-utils-dbgsym_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-guest-x11_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-guest-x11-dbgsym_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-qt_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-qt-dbgsym_6.0.14-dfsg-2_amd64.deb
virtualbox-source_6.0.14-dfsg-2_all.deb

The debs can be installed (from within the BUILD directory) with

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$ su -c "dpkg -i ./*.deb"

However, I needed to redifine the path variable (don't copy the initial $):

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$ PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin su -c "dpkg -i ./*.deb"

Followed by the commands I gave above:

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# dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms
# dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox
# modprobe vboxdrv

After that, to get rid of the build dependencies there are various ways to do this; see for example this how-to-uninstall-all-packages-installed-by-aptitude-build-dep which are OK even though apt was used in this example.

[Loci.Cantos]

Nice. Lots of good information here.
Thanks Head_on_a_Stick. Thanks Steve Pusser. Thanks Kedaha.