How To Install VirtualBox on Linux Mint 20

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VirtualBox on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, VirtualBox is a program that allows you to install an operating system without changing your computer’s main operating system. This software allows you to create and run guest operating systems (“virtual machines”) such as Linux and Windows on top of the host operating system.

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 Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
• 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 Linux Mint 20 Ulyana

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

sudo apt update

Step 2. Installing VirtualBox on Linux Mint 20.

Now import the public key of the Oracle VirtualBox repository on your system:

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

Then, add the VirtualBox repository using the below command:

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

Once the repository is enabled, update the package list and install the latest version of VirtualBox:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install virtualbox-6.1

After the installation, check the VirtualBox Linux kernel module service status to ensure the VirtualBox installation is successful:

sudo systemctl status vboxdrv

Step 3. Launching VirtualBox.

Once the installation is complete, Start VirtualBox (on Cinnamon desktop): Menu » Administration » Oracle VM VirtualBox 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 VirtualBox on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official VirtualBox website.