This how-to is written for Linux beginners or openSUSE 10.3 newbies who are already familiar with the VirtualBox software. In this article, I will show you how to set up the open source version of VirtualBox by InnoTek on your new openSUSE 10.3 x86_64. As you know, VirtualBox is a virtualization software for x86 hardware, suitable for enterprise and home users.

The DVD image of openSUSE 10.3 x86_64 has an older version of VirtualBox 1.5.0. In order to install the latest VirtualBox 1.5.2 OSE, I decided to use the Build Service of openSUSE. By the way, I am going to install VirtualBox 1.5.2 OSE into my new openSUSE 10.3 x86_64 residing on my Compaq Presario notebook with Turion 64x2 processor, with AMD's AMD-V hardware virtualization capability.

The first thing you have to do is to launch YaST and then you have to run the community repository tool so that you can add the openSUSE Build Service repository for the latest VirtualBox 1.5.2 OSE, which was released on 18th of October 2007.

After YaST has updated its rpm database, you can now launch the Package Selector of YaST. At the Package Selector, you only need to choose to install VirtualBox 1.5.2 OSE. The needed-set of packages, namely virtualbox-1.5.2-13.2.x86_64.rpm and virtualbox-kmp-default-1.5.2_2.6.22.5_31-13.2.x86_64.rpm rpm packages with sizes of 12.25MB and 59.31kB respectively will be downloaded from the openSUSE Build Service repository. It took only about 3 minutes to download. Pretty fast!

After the completion of the installation of VirtualBox software and its dependency, you have to load the kernel driver for VirtualBox by executing, modprobe vboxdrv, at the command-line. Subsequently, you have to add the current user or yourself to the vboxusers group using YaST. Please remember to logout and login again for this to take effect.

Should you receive an error message on the kernel driver, upon starting the virtual machine, you may have to set up the kernel driver for VirtualBox properly. This is done by executing the vboxdrv setup commad at the /etc/init.d directory, as a root user. If you have problems with setting up VirtualBox on openSUSE 10.3 or on other Linux distros, you can visit its forum.

Once you have started the VirtualBox program, you may want to enable its support for the AMD or Intel's hardware virtualization technology, provided that your CPU has such capability.

Thank you for reading this mini how-to.

By Michael Shee Choon Beng

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By Michael Shee Choon Beng.

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