How to install Virtualbox 7 on Rocky Linux /Alma Linux /Red Hat 9

Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install VirtualBox 7 on Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9 / Red Hat Linux 9.

Virtualbox is an application belonging to Oracle with which we can create virtual machines on our desktop but from a modern and easy to use graphical interface.

This means that any user, no matter how novice, can in a matter of minutes creates and manage a virtual machine to install other operating systems. For what purpose? For testing, development and so on.

VirtualBox is quite popular and therefore has an active development that makes it ideal in numerous instances. Version 7 has already been released, so it’s a good idea to know how to install it to get the latest updates.

Installing Virtualbox 7 on Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9 / Red Hat Linux 9

As you can imagine, Virtualbox is not present in the official repositories of these distributions, but it has an external one that we can add and complete the process.

First, open a terminal and make sure that the whole system is updated correctly

sudo dnf update

Next, you need to activate and add the EPEL repository. To achieve this, run.

sudo dnf install epel-release

This way, you will quickly have EPEL added to the system.

The next step is to install some tools that are necessary for VirtualBox

sudo dnf install dkms kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc perl bzip2 wget curl make

As you can see, these are basic tools for VirtualBox to run and emulate systems.

Next, you need to add the VirtualBox repository to the system.

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/el/virtualbox.repo

Finally, you can run the following command to install VirtualBox

sudo dnf install VirtualBox-7.0

It will start downloading and installing it.

Optional but recommended: Install Extension Pack

The extension pack is highly recommended to install because it adds features that are not in VirtualBox by default. Some of them are:

• Copying and pasting text to and from the host.
• Use of USB devices in your virtual environment
• Use of the webcam on the guest system.
• Disk image encryption.

But also, I always notice a better performance in the use of the system.

I repeat, it is not mandatory, but highly recommended.

To do so, download it

wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.2/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-7.0.2.vbox-extpack

Note: it needs to be the same version of VirtualBox. So note well the versions and check them on Oracle’s website.

Thereafter, build the kernel modules

sudo /sbin/vboxconfig

Then, simply install the extension pack

sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-*.vbox-extpack

To achieve this, you have to be in the same directory as the package.

This will suffice.

Running VirtualBox

Now it remains to open VirtualBox from the main menu

And you can use it as you want

Conclusion

VirtualBox is one of the best applications to make virtual machines without problems. Being from Oracle, it is not present in the repositories of many distributions, but this does not make it impossible to have it.