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Arronical
Asked: 2016-04-08 04:13:20 +0800 CST

Can I install the VirtualBox Extension Pack from the Ubuntu repositories?

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I have VirtualBox running on several server installations, always without any GUI, administering using the vboxmanage commands.

I used to install from the Oracle PPA, but since the end of the two different versions of vbox, I've been installing from the Ubuntu repos. I've found the package for installing the guest additions iso, but never been aware of the extension packs being there.

I'm asking as the virtualbox version for 14.04 moved from 4.3.10 to 4.3.34 a little while back, so added a step for me running apt-get dist-upgrade.

I know how to get hold of these from Oracle and install them manually, but is there another method, without using GUI? Are the extension packs anywhere in the Ubuntu repos?

apt

4 Answers

  1. This assumes virtualbox is already installed.

    I looked at the source of the virtualbox-ext-pack package in Ubuntu and I found some gems. I did the following which is a variation on what that package does in a script I am using:

    VBOXVERSION=$(VBoxManage --version | sed -r 's/([0-9])\.([0-9])\.([0-9]{1,2}).*/\1.\2.\3/')
wget -q -N "http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$VBOXVERSION/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVERSION.vbox-extpack"
VBoxManage extpack install --replace Oracle*.vbox-extpack

    This was on Debian Jessie, but I am quite confident it would work the same on almost any flavor of Linux, possibly Unix too.

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  2. Best Answer

    Because the Virtual Box extension pack is closed source proprietary software we will not be able to provide debian packages or binaries from the Ubuntu repositories.

    To ease installing of extension packs to Virtual Box versions provided by the repositories we maintain a download helper script in the multiverse repository from Ubuntu >= 15.10 which will download the extension pack from Oracle (virtualbox-ext-pack).

    Do not install this for Virtual Box versions you had downloaded and installed from other sources.

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  3. On Ubuntu 17.04+:

    sudo apt install virtualbox-ext-pack

    PS: I know this question was made a long time ago when this was not an option, but I'm writing this answer to help people that came here through Google in 2018+.

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  4. apt-cache search virtualbox gives me an virtualbox-ext-pack which is the pack youre looking for.

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