[CentOS - VirtualBox]: How to Install Oracle VirtualBox 5.1 on CentOS/RHEL 7/6 and Fedora 23/22

How to Install Oracle VirtualBox 5.1 on CentOS/RHEL 7/6 and Fedora 23/22

This article will help you to install Oracle VirtualBox 5.1 on CentOS, Redhat and Fedora systems using Yum.

Step 1 – Add Required Yum Repositories

Firstly you are required to add VirtualBox yum repository in your system. Download repository file from its official site and place it under at /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo .First navigate to /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory and use one of below commands as per your operating system.

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

For CentOS/RHEL Systems:
# wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/rhel/virtualbox.repo

For Fedora Systems:
# wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo

CentOS/RHEL Users also need to add EPEL yum repository using one of following command.

CentOS/RHEL 7, 64 Bit (x86_64): 

# rpm -Uvh http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-8.noarch.rpm

CentOS/RHEL 6, 64 Bit (x86_64): 

# rpm -Uvh http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Step 2 – Install Required Packages

Before installing VirtualBox make sure to install all required packages to run VirtualBox like kernel-headers, kernel-devels etc. Use following command to install required packages.

# yum install gcc make patch  dkms qt libgomp
# yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel fontforge binutils glibc-headers glibc-devel

Step 3 – Setup Environment Variable

VirtualBox installation required kernel source code to install required modules, So we need to configure environment variable KERN_DIR to which VirtualBox get kernel source code. In my case latest kernel source is available in 2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.x86_64 directory under /usr/src/kernels/ . Make sure you are using correct source path.

# export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.x86_64

Step 4 – Install Oracle VirtualBox and Setup

Use following command to install VirtualBox 5.1 using yum command line tool. It will install latest version of VirtualBox 5.1.x on your system.

# yum install VirtualBox-5.1

After installation we need to rebuild kernel modules using following command.

# service vboxdrv setup

Step 5 – Start VirtualBox

Use following command to start VirtualBox from X windows. You can switch to GUI mode using init 5 or startx commands from terminal.

# virtualbox &