How To Install VirtualBox on Linux Mint 21

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VirtualBox on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, VirtualBox is a free and open-source hypervisor for x86 and x86-64 virtualization, which the Oracle Corporation develops. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature-rich, high-performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. It can be installed on operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Solaris, and macOS.

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 the step-by-step installation of a VirtualBox Virtualization on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• 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 21 Vanessa

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
sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https wget ca-certificates gnupg2

Step 2. Installing VirtualBox on Linux Mint 21.

By default, VirtualBox is not available on the Linux Mint 21 base repository. Now we add the VirtualBox repository to your system using the following command:

echo deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/virtualbox.gpg] http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian jammy contrib | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

Next, import the GPG key:

sudo wget -O- https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/virtualbox.gpg

Now start by updating the packages list and install VirtualBox stable by using the command below:

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. Accessing VirtualBox on Linux Mint 21.

Once we finish with the installation, we will find VirtualBox in the Mint menu, in the Administration section or you can launch it through the terminal with the help of the command shown below:

virtualbox

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