Sun Microsystems 3.0.0 user manual Performing a manual installation

2 Installation

After that you need to put every user which should be able to use VirtualBox in the group vboxusers, either through the GUI user management tools or by running the following command as root:

sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers username

Note: The usermod command of some older Linux distributions does not support the -a option (which adds the user to the given group without affecting membership of other groups). In this case, find out the current group memberships with the groups command and add all these groups in a comma-separated list to the command line after the -G option, e.g. like this: usermod -G group1,group2,vboxusers username.

If any users on your system should be able to access host USB devices from within VirtualBox guests, you should also add them to the appropriate user group that your distribution uses for USB access, e.g. usb or usbusers.

2.3.4.3 Performing a manual installation

If, for any reason, you cannot use the shell script installer described previously, you can also perform a manual installation. Invoke the installer like this:

./VirtualBox.run --keep --noexec

This will unpack all the files needed for installation in the directory install under the current directory. The VirtualBox application files are contained in VirtualBox.tar.bz2 which you can unpack to any directory on your system. For example:

sudo mkdir /opt/VirtualBox

sudo tar jxf ./install/VirtualBox.tar.bz2 -C /opt/VirtualBox

or as root:

mkdir /opt/VirtualBox

tar jxf ./install/VirtualBox.tar.bz2 -C /opt/VirtualBox

The sources for VirtualBox’s kernel module are provided in the src directory. To build the module, change to the directory and issue

make

If everything builds correctly, issue the following command to install the module to the appropriate module directory:

sudo make install

In case you do not have sudo, switch the user account to root and perform

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