Developed by Innotek, VirtualBox was first released on January 17, 2007. It is available on many platforms, such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and Solaris, making it a cross-platform application. It is also a free, open source hypervisor written in C, C ++, and x86 Assembly. At the time of writing, the latest stable release is 6.1.6.

With the help of a hypervisor we can control, i.e. create and run our virtual machines. There are basically two types of hypervisor – type 1 (bare) and type 2 (hosted). Type 1 hypervisor runs on host equipment and does not require the installation of an operating system as a prerequisite.

On the other hand, to run the VirtualBox application, you must install the operating system. Therefore, we can say that this is a type 2 hypervisor.

For better performance and better support, we can also install VirtualBox Guest Add-ons and the VirtualBox Extension Pack.

Note. You may need superuser rights to perform the following operation. If you do not have one, contact your system administrator for help.

Install VirtualBox on Ubuntu 20.04

Since VirtualBox is already available through the standard Ubuntu repository, you need to update the repository first to make the latest version available. Therefore, open a terminal, and enter the following command:

sudo apt update

Now, install VirtualBox –

sudo apt install virtualbox

This will allow you to download the appropriate application and its related dependencies.

In addition to this, we can also install VirtualBox Guest Additions and the VirtualBox extension pack. We discussed only part of the installation.

To install VirtualBox guest add-ons, enter the following command

sudo apt install virtualbox-guest-additions-iso

and to install the VirtualBox extension pack

sudo apt install virtualbox-ext-pack

You will need to agree to the terms of the license

After installation, locate VirtualBox in the application menu.

Do you use VirtualBox? For what purpose?