How to Build VirtualBox on Linux

Building VirtualBox on Linux

When I first tried to build VirtualBox, the configure script returned a number of errors: missing as86, missing IDL, missing SDL, and so on. I had to add these packages on a Mageia system (and see this page for how to add and manage packages):

dev86
iasl
libIDL-config
lib64IDL2-devel
libcurl-devel
lib64SDL
lib64SDL-devel
lib64python2.6-devel
makeself 

That allowed the configure script to run, but now the next step failed:

% make kmk
[ ... much output deleted ... ]
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lstdc++

Depending on the sequence of events, the missing libraries may be listed as -lcrypt, -lpthread, etc., even though /lib64 and /usr/lib64 contain libcrypto.so*.

But the libstdc++-devel package is installed...

I eventually realized that I needed the libstdc++-static-devel package. After installing that and re-running the configure script I got a different error. Actually a bunch of errors along these general lines:

/home/cromwell/VirtualBox-4.1.8_OSE/src/libs/xpcom18a4/java/src/nsJavaXPCOMBindingUtils.cpp:57:
		error: 'jclass' does not name a type

My solution was to solve the problem by avoiding it:

% ./configure --disable-java
% kmk all 

That cleanly built the VirtualBox binaries. Then I was able to build and install the Linux kernel module:

% out/linux.amd64/release/bin/src
% make
% su
Password: ################
# make install
# for f in VirtualBox VBoxHeadless VBoxSDL VBoxBFE VBoxNetDHCP VBoxNetAdpCtl; do
>    chown root.root $f
>    chmod 4511 $f
>  done 

Now I can run virtual machines with VirtualBox!

% ~/VirtualBox-4.1.8_OSE/bin/VirtualBox &