This way you can be sure that the right version will be installed, and they will also upgrade together if needed. So the name of the game is to use same version for the packages, possibly use the same repository as well, preferably your distribution's repos. After installation you possibly need to
otherwise you may still get configuration errors in VirtualBox settings. Besides virtualbox-ext-pack I have virtualbox, virtualbox-dkms, and virtualbox-qt packages installed, a bunch of gvfs packages, and of course dkms.
(You'd want to go to a PPA and fiddle around yourself only if your distribution's offered packages are missing some features and the PPA would offer a later version with those fatures. But then I'd advise to use the PPA for all virtualbox packages and don't mix and match.)
It is important that the extension pack match the version of VirtualBox installed. If VirtualBox gets updated via a ppa or however, you need to remove the old extension pack, download the new one, and install it.
In my case deleting the previous virtualbox-ext-oracle build directory, to start fresh was all that was needed.
It was trying to build using the old, existing PKGBUILD rather than overwriting it with the new one. Check the PKGBUILD before the building to verify version is pkgver=7.0.8 rather than pkgver=7.0.6.
VirtualBox is a hypervisor used to run operating systems in a special environment, called a virtual machine, on top of the existing operating system. VirtualBox is in constant development and new features are implemented continuously. It comes with a Qt GUI interface, as well as headless and SDL command-line tools for managing and running virtual machines.
In order to integrate functions of the host system to the guests, including shared folders and clipboard, video acceleration and a seamless window integration mode, guest additions are provided for some guest operating systems.
To compile the VirtualBox modules provided by virtualbox-host-dkms, it will also be necessary to install the appropriate headers package(s) for your installed kernel(s) (e.g. linux-lts-headers for linux-lts). [1] When either VirtualBox or the kernel is updated, the kernel modules will be automatically recompiled thanks to the DKMS pacman hook.
virtualbox-host-modules-arch and virtualbox-host-dkms use systemd-modules-load.service to load VirtualBox modules automatically at boot time. For the modules to be loaded after installation, either reboot or load the modules once manually; the list of modules can be found in /usr/lib/modules-load.d/virtualbox-host-modules-arch.conf or /usr/lib/modules-load.d/virtualbox-host-dkms.conf.
It is also recommended to install the virtualbox-guest-iso package on the host running VirtualBox. This package will act as a disc image that can be used to install the guest additions onto guest systems other than Arch Linux. The .iso file will be located at /usr/lib/virtualbox/additions/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso, and may have to be mounted manually inside the virtual machine. Once mounted, you can run the guest additions installer inside the guest. For Arch Linux guest also see VirtualBox/Install Arch Linux as a guest#Install the Guest Additions.
In order to avoid having to install the guest system manually, some operating systems support unattended installation. This allows the user to configure the system to be installed in VirtualBox's interface prior to starting the machine. At the end of the setup process, the operating system is installed without requiring any further user interaction. This feature requires the virtualbox-unattended-templatesAUR package.
The Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack provides additional features and is released under a non-free license only available for personal use. To install it, the virtualbox-ext-oracleAUR package is available, and a prebuilt version can be found in the seblu repository.
If you prefer to use the traditional and manual way: download the extension pack manually and install it via the GUI (File > Tools > Extension Pack Manager) or via VBoxManage extpack install , make sure you have a toolkit like Polkit to grant privileged access to VirtualBox. The installation of extension pack requires root access.
One of the non-free extension pack features is support for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This part of functionality can also be obtained with the open source VNC Extension Pack, by installing the virtualbox-ext-vnc package.
A security feature in Wayland (i.e. when using GDM) disallows VirtualBox to grab all keyboard input. This is annoying when you want to pass window manager shortcuts to your guest operating system. It can be bypassed by whitelisting VirtualBox:
VirtualBox does not support QEMU's QCOW2 disk image format. To use a QCOW2 disk image with VirtualBox you therefore need to convert it, which you can do with qemu-img. qemu-img can convert QCOW to / from VDI, VMDK, VHDX, RAW and various other formats (which you can see by running qemu-img --help).
VirtualBox offers simulation of TRIM in VDI files via an experimental "discard" attachment option. This option is undocumented and can be accessed by commandline or .vbox file editing. When enabled, TRIM commands from the guest operating system causes the corresponding part of the VDI file to be compacted away.
If you are running out of space due to the small hard drive size you selected when you created your virtual machine, the solution adviced by the VirtualBox manual is to use VBoxManage modifyhd. However this command only works for VDI and VHD disks and only for the dynamically allocated variants. If you want to resize a fixed size virtual disk disk too, read on this trick which works either for a Windows or UNIX-like virtual machine.
To get the storage controller name and the port number, you can use the command VBoxManage showvminfo virtual_machine_name. Among the output you will get such a result (what you are looking for is in italic):
If you think that editing a simple XML file is more convenient than playing with the GUI or with VBoxManage and you want to replace (or add) a virtual disk to your virtual machine, in the .vbox configuration file corresponding to your virtual machine, simply replace the GUID, the file location and the format to your needs:
The information about path to harddisks and the snapshots is stored between .... tags in the file with the .vbox extension. You can edit them manually or use this script where you will need change only the path or use defaults, assumed that .vbox is in the same directory with a virtual harddisk and the snapshots folder. It will print out new configuration to stdout.
UUIDs are widely used by VirtualBox. Each virtual machines and each virtual disk of a virtual machine must have a different UUID. When you launch a virtual machine in VirtualBox, VirtualBox will keep track of all UUIDs of your virtual machine instance. See the VBoxManage list to list the items registered with VirtualBox.
If you cloned a virtual disk manually by copying the virtual disk file, you will need to assign a new UUID to the cloned virtual drive if you want to use the disk in the same virtual machine or even in another (if that one has already been opened, and thus registered, with VirtualBox).
If you plan to use your virtual machine on another hypervisor or want to import in VirtualBox a virtual machine created with another hypervisor, you might be interested in reading the following steps.
Guest additions are available in most hypervisor solutions: VirtualBox comes with the Guest Additions, VMware with the VMware Tools, Parallels with the Parallels Tools, etc. These additional components are designed to be installed inside a virtual machine after the guest operating system has been installed. They consist of device drivers and system applications that optimize the guest operating system for better performance and usability by providing these features.
If you have installed the additions to your virtual machine, please uninstall them first. Your guest, especially if it is using an operating system from the Windows family, might behave weirdly, crash or even might not boot at all if you are still using the specific drivers in another hypervisor.
Some companies provide tools which offer the ability to create virtual machines from a Windows or GNU/Linux operating system located either in a virtual machine or even in a native installation. With such a product, you do not need to apply this and the following steps and can stop reading here.
Each hypervisor have their own virtual machine configuration file: .vbox for VirtualBox, .vmx for VMware, a config.pvs file located in the virtual machine bundle (.pvm file), etc. You will have thus to recreate a new virtual machine in your new destination hypervisor and specify its hardware configuration as close as possible as your initial virtual machine.
Pay a close attention to the firmware interface (BIOS or UEFI) used to install the guest operating system. While an option is available to choose between these 2 interfaces on VirtualBox and on Parallels solutions, on VMware, you will have to add manually the following line to your .vmx file.
It can be useful to start virtual machines directly with a keyboard shortcut instead of using the VirtualBox interface (GUI or CLI). For that, you can simply define key bindings in .xbindkeysrc. Please refer to Xbindkeys for more details.
If the device that you are looking for does not show up on any of the menus in the section above and you have tried all three USB controller options,boot up your virtual machine three separate times. Once using the USB 1.1 controller, another using the USB 2.0 controller, etc. Leave the virtual machine running for at least 5 minutes after startup. Sometimes Windows will autodetect the device for you. Be sure you filter any devices that are not a keyboard or a mouse so they do not start up at boot. This ensures that Windows will detect the device at start-up.
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