Installing VirtualBox on Debian

VirtualBox is an open source x86 emulator developed by innotek (bought by Sun, now Oracle) comparable to VMware. A proprietary extra package enhances the base experience, adding things like RDP access to the Guest.

Installing VirtualBox

Debian 10 “Buster”, Debian 11 “Bullseye”, and Debian 12 “Bookworm”

Packages for VirtualBox are not officially available in stable releases of Debian, due to lack of cooperation from upstream on security support for older releases. See 794466

However, new versions of VirtualBox are made available to stable users on a “rolling” basis by Debian Fast Track, a Debian project. This is currently available for Debian 10 through 12.

Import fasttrack archive keyring:

# apt install fasttrack-archive-keyring

Add following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list on your bookworm system.

deb https://fasttrack.debian.net/debian-fasttrack/ bookworm-fasttrack main contrib

deb https://fasttrack.debian.net/debian-fasttrack/ bookworm-backports-staging main contrib

Install the VirtualBox package with:

sudo apt install virtualbox

Optionally install the extension pack with:

sudo apt install virtualbox-ext-pack

You are now ready to go!

Happy VM’ing! Is that a word? I don’t think so. 🙂