13 April, 2009

Installing VirtualBox 2.2

I've been evaluating VirtualBox, comparing it to VMware Server.

One of my first discoveries is the extent of changes since VirtualBox OSE 1.6.6, the verified package of Debian.

I found it not to be worthwhile in comparing 1.6.6 to VMware 2.0 since the feature set has significantly evolved and it wouldn't be a fair comparison comparing the latest version of VMware to VirtualBox development months old.

First step; update the Debian sources to make VirtualBox 2.2 available. Start by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list, adding the line

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/ etch non-free
Next, install virtualbox-2.2; you may need to uninstall any previous version.


# apt-get update
# apt-get install virtualbox-2.2


Start the interactive UI by invoking the command:

$ VirtualBox

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