Welcome to how to Install VirtualBox on Kali Linux, Ubuntu and Debian.
What’s VirtualBox?
VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualization application; basically, it is a type 2 hypervisor allowing you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single host machine, you can run more than one operating system at a time e.g running windows application on Linux
Why VirtualBox?
Virtualbox is a great tool for creating your own labs for different tasks like Networking, Server administration practice, software testing, testing different Linux and Windows distributions, Hacking labs e.t.c.
You can easily create an isolated lab and try different software, tools, and operating systems without fear of breaking base OS. The only limiting factor will be your CPU Processing speed and majorly the size of your RAM.
There are versions for various Operating systems. A host operating system is the operating system of the physical computer on which VirtualBox is installed on. Guest is the operating system that is running on the virtual machine.
If you have an older version of Virtualbox running on Kali Linux and Ubuntu or Debian Linux distribution, you can easily upgrade to the latest release. I tried to download the Debian package for my Kali Linux Box and install it with dpkg -i command but it was throwing me some errors. I found the correct way to install it and here it is:
Installing VirtualBox
For Ubuntu, you can just download the packages from:
then install it by typing
sudo dpkg -i package_name.deb
For debian and Kali Linux based on Debian 9, you can download navigate to /etc/apt/sources file.
$ sudo vim /etc/apt/sources
Then add any of the following lines according to your distribution.
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian stretch contrib
For Debian 8, replace stretch with jessie.
Add Oracle public key for apt-secure using
sudo wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
Now install the latest version of VirtualBox
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dkms sudo apt-get install virtualbox
Now download VirtualBox 5.2.4 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack
After successfully downloading, then double-click on it, it will just install automatically.
You can now launch VirtualBox by just typing
$ virtualbox
Alternatively, you can start VirtualBox in Headless mode using VBoxHeadless like this:
$ VBoxHeadless -startvm "VMName"
To uninstall VirtualBox with its configuration settings type:
sudo apt-get --purge remove virtualbox
That’s the end of how to Install VirtualBox on Kali Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian. Hope this was helpful. See you in the next article.
