How to Install Oracle VirtualBox 6.0 on CentOS/RHEL 7/6

Oracle VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualization application. It installs on your existing Intel or AMD-based computers, whether they are running Windows, Mac, Linux or Solaris operating systems. It extends the capabilities of your existing computer so that it can run multiple operating systems at the same time. Click here to read more about VirtualBox

Oracle has released its new major version VirtualBox 6.0.4 . In this release VirtualBox has improves stability and fixes regressions. To read more about this release read changelog. This article will help you to install Oracle VirtualBox 6.0 on CentOS and Redhat 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/
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/rhel/virtualbox.repo

The CentOS and RedHat users also required to add EPEL yum repository using one of the following commands.

### On CentOS/RHEL 7 ### 
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

### On CentOS/RHEL 6 ### 
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/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 the following command to install the required packages.

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

After installing latest kernel and kernel headers, let’s reboot your system and start with Latest kernel.

reboot

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/`uname -r`

Step 4 – Install Oracle VirtualBox and Setup

Use the following command to install VirtualBox using the yum command line tool. It will install the latest version of VirtualBox 5.2 on your system.

yum install VirtualBox-6.0

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

service vboxdrv setup

Step 5 – Launch 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