How to Install VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 23 from RPMs

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a flexible open-source hypervisor for x86 computers from Oracle Corporation initially developed by Innotek GmbH. It runs on many platforms including: Linux, Windows, Solaris, providing great virtualization environment to run multiple VMs at a time.

In this tutorial we present how to install VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 23 from RPMs in few simple steps.

Steps:

1. Download VirtualBox repository for Fedora

Go to repository folder and download virtualbox.repo file:

[root@tuxfixer ~]# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
[root@tuxfixer yum.repos.d]# wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo

2. Install VirtualBox 5.1 package

[root@tuxfixer ~]# dnf install VirtualBox-5.1

Ensure that vboxdrv kernel module was loaded after VirtualBox installation:

[root@tuxfixer ~]# lsmod | grep vboxdrv
vboxdrv               430080  3 vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt,vboxpci

3. Assign a non-privileged user to run VirtualBox

Avoid running VirtualBox as root for security reasons. During VirtualBox installation a user group called vboxusers is created by installation scripts. Add a regular non-privileged user to supplementary group vboxusers in order to use this user for VirtualBox operation and maintenance:

[root@tuxfixer ~]# usermod -aG vboxusers tuxfixer
[root@tuxfixer ~]# id tuxfixer
uid=1000(tuxfixer) gid=1000(tuxfixer) groups=1000(tuxfixer),985(wireshark),965(vboxusers)

4. Launch VirtualBox

To launch VirtualBox, just execute the below command as dedicated non-privileged user:

[tuxfixer@tuxfixer ~]$ VirtualBox