rootninja

After you get through the initial basic system configuration, here’s a quick how to get VirtualBox up and running on Debian Squeeze in minutes.

The only package group i’m going to assume you installed was “SSH Server”.

Add some repositories

You might not need this for just VirtualBox, but I needed it for qlogic fibrechannel drivers. Since you’re using VirtualBox, you’re probably just as happy to install packages from the non-free repositories too, right?

Add these two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports/ squeeze-backports main contrib non-free

Install VritualBox’s dependencies

# apt-get install libqt4 libqt4-network libqt4-opengl libqtgui4 libqtcore4 libaudio2 qt4-qtconfig linux-headers make gcc-4.3 g++-4.4 dkms libstd-ttf2.0-0 libstdc++6-4.4-dev linux-headers-common libqt4-qt3support linux-kbuild libqt4-xml libqt4-sql libqt4-designer libqt4-script libqt4-dbus cpp gcc-base

Install a decent web browser

apt-get install chromium-browser

Download and install the latest VirtualBox package from http://www.virtualbox.org

Get the .deb package for your Debian architecture and install it using dpkg.

dpkg -i virtualbox*.deb

Start VirtualBox

You can start it from the top panel or from a command line.

$ VirtualBox

Finally, install some networking tools

Not strictly necessary, but useful when you run into problems and you’re not quite sure if the cause is a problem on a guest OS or the host.

apt-get install nmap ntp ntpdate wireshark

That’s it. At this point you’re ready to install some guest operating systems.