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5 starting virtualbox on linux, 4 installing on solaris hosts, 1 performing the installation – Sun Microsystems VIRTUALBOX VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 User Manual

Page 41: Starting virtualbox on linux, Installing on solaris hosts, Performing the installation

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2 Installation details

2.3.5 Starting VirtualBox on Linux

The easiest way to start a VirtualBox program is by running the program of your choice
(VirtualBox, VBoxManage, VBoxSDL or VBoxHeadless) from a terminal. These
are symbolic links to VBox.sh that start the required program for you.

The following detailed instructions should only be of interest if you wish to exe-

cute VirtualBox without installing it first. You should start by compiling the vboxdrv
kernel module (see above) and inserting it into the Linux kernel. VirtualBox consists
of a service daemon (VBoxSVC) and several application programs. The daemon is
automatically started if necessary. All VirtualBox applications will communicate with
the daemon through Unix local domain sockets. There can be multiple daemon in-
stances under different user accounts and applications can only communicate with
the daemon running under the user account as the application. The local domain
socket resides in a subdirectory of your system’s directory for temporary files called
.vbox--ipc

. In case of communication problems or server startup

problems, you may try to remove this directory.

All VirtualBox applications (VirtualBox, VBoxSDL, VBoxManage and VBoxHeadless)

require the VirtualBox directory to be in the library path:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./VBoxManage showvminfo "Windows XP"

2.4 Installing on Solaris hosts

For the various versions of Solaris that we support as host operating systems, please
refer to chapter

1.4

,

Supported host operating systems

, page

14

.

If you have a previously installed instance of VirtualBox on your Solaris host, please

uninstall it first before installing a new instance. Refer to chapter

2.4.3

,

Uninstallation

,

page

42

for uninstall instructions.

2.4.1 Performing the installation

VirtualBox is available as a standard Solaris package. Download the VirtualBox SunOS
package which includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of VirtualBox. The installa-
tion must be performed as root and from the global zone

as the VirtualBox installer loads

kernel drivers which cannot be done from non-global zones. To verify which zone you
are currently in, execute the zonename command. Execute the following commands:

gunzip -cd VirtualBox-3.1.0_BETA2-SunOS.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Starting with VirtualBox 3.1 the VirtualBox kernel package is no longer a separate

package and has been integrated into the main package. Install the VirtualBox package
using:

pkgadd -d VirtualBox-3.1.0_BETA2-SunOS.pkg

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