Installing VirtualBox on Fedora 32

3 min readApr 3, 2020

A Step by Step guide to get VirtualBox Running on Fedora 32 Beta

Its been a week since Fedora 32 has been released as beta, and as like me geeks out there are keen to install and try it on their systems to check out new features and improvement, and many of them are using it in their primary workstation, so chances are many things are going to break. Although most of them can be ignored, some can’t be, one such is VirtualBox, primary virtualization software for all the developers and IT engineers out there, especially those who are using vagrant on daily basis.

So you’d ask why a step by step guide? VirtualBox package is available on it official site for fedora 31 why can’t we install it? Well thats what I thought and it worked when switching from version 30 to 31, but it didn’t work this time, its not able to find some python related dependency,

Error: 
 Problem: conflicting requests
  - nothing provides python(abi) = 3.7 needed by VirtualBox-6.1-6.1.4_136177_fedora31-1.x86_64

this I guessed was because fedora 32 beta comes with python 3.8 by default and I tried to install python 3.7 but that also didn’t work, and I am not a person who would spend a lot of time searching for the dependency, as I needed to get vagrant running within an hour of this realization.

So what to do? Well for that you’ll need to download and install virtual box test build listed here . Get the one titled Linux 64-bit under latest 6.1.x test builds section. These are the test releases with latest changes in developmet but works well for regular use, I’ve been using it since and didn’t have any issue for my use case.

I don’t know what is your use case it will work with most, its all upto you.

Step 1: Download Installer

Download installer by running the following command.

URLs are for reference, and were available at the time of writing, might not work when you are reading this.So if it doesn’t work get link to latest available version from the test builds page mentioned earlier.

wget https://www.virtualbox.org/download/testcase/VirtualBox-6.1.9-138428-Linux_amd64.run

Step 2: Installation

After the installer is Downloaded give executable permissions to it.

chmod +x VirtualBox-6.1.9-138428-Linux_amd64.run

Now run the installer with sudo privileges.

sudo ./VirtualBox-6.1.9-138428-Linux_amd64.runVerifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox for Linux installation.............
VirtualBox Version 6.1.5 r136807 (2020-04-02T09:32:34Z) installer
Removing previous installation of VirtualBox 6.1.4 r136177 from /opt/VirtualBox
Installing VirtualBox to /opt/VirtualBox
Python found: 1, installing bindings...
/bin/bash: 1: command not found
cat: /etc/vbox/python-filelist: No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove '/etc/vbox/python-filelist': No such file or directoryVirtualBox has been installed successfully.You will find useful information about using VirtualBox in the user manual
  /opt/VirtualBox/UserManual.pdf
and in the user FAQ
  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/User_FAQWe hope that you enjoy using VirtualBox.

And after that you’ll be able to use VirtualBox as you did previously.

Step 3: Uninstall (Just in case it doesn’t work for you)

It worked for me and I didn’t need to uninstall it, (only did it once to verify this step of tutorial 😅) , so what if it doesn’t? you don’t need to go anywhere else.

Go to /opt/VirtualBox on your system and run the uninstall script.

cd /opt/VirtualBox
sudo ./uninstall.sh

And here you go.. In Just 2 little steps (because I believe you won’t need the 3rd one 😂) You have virtualbox running on your Fedora 32 Beta, until an official rpm package is available.

Thanks for Reading!😇

Installing VirtualBox on Fedora 32

Written by Dishant Pandya