How To Install VirtualBox on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VirtualBox on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, VirtualBox is an open-source x86 emulator/virtualization developed by Oracle. VirtualBox allows us to install and run multiple virtual machines of different distributions at the same time. VirtualBox supports guest operating systems such as Windows, Debian, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, and more.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of VirtualBox on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install VirtualBox on Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install gnupg2
sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms

Step 2. Installing VirtualBox on Debian 11.

By default, VirtualBox is available on Debian-based repositories. Now we run the following command to add VirtualBox repository on your system:

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Next, import repository GPG key:

echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian bullseye contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

After that, update the Debian repository index and install it:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install virtualbox-6.1

Optionally install the VirtualBox extension pack with:

wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.26/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-6.1.26.vbox-extpack

Next, run the following command below to install the extension pack:

sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-6.1.26.vbox-extpack

Step 3. Accessing VirtualBox on Debian.

Once successfully installed, launch the VirtualBox by going to Activities -> Search or open a terminal window and run the following command to open it:

virtualbox

Congratulations! You have successfully installed VirtualBox. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the VirtualBox on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official VirtualBox website.