How to Install VirtualBox on Fedora 36 / Fedora 35

VirtualBox is a widely known open-source virtualization software that lets you run multiple guest operating systems (virtual machines) on a single host machine.

It supports the guest virtual machines running Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, Haiku, and OSx86 operating systems.

Here, we will see how to install VirtualBox on Fedora 36 / Fedora 35.

Add VirtualBox Repository

First, switch to the root user.

sudo su -

Then, install kernel headers and DKMS packages

dnf install -y kernel-devel-$(uname -r) kernel-headers

Next, import Oracle public key to the system.

rpm --import  https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc

Then, add the VirtualBox repository to the system with the below command.

dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo

Install VirtualBox on Fedora 36

BIOS System

First, install VirtualBox using the dnf command.

dnf install -y VirtualBox-6.1

Then, add your user account to the vboxuser group.

usermod -aG vboxusers raj

EFI System

First, install VirtualBox using the dnf command.

dnf install -y VirtualBox-6.1

Then, add your user account to the vboxuser group.

usermod -aG vboxusers raj

On EFI secure boot systems, you need to sign VirtualBox modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt, vboxnetadp, vboxpci) before loading them. So, to sign the modules, you will need to have a machine owner key that is trusted by EFI firmware.

Follow the below steps to sign all the VirtualBox modules.

First, generate the MOK (Machine Owner Key).

dnf install -y openssl 
mkdir /root/module-signing
cd /root/module-signing
openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout MOK.priv -outform DER -out MOK.der -nodes -days 36500 -subj "/CN=MSI/"
chmod 600 MOK.priv

Then, import the generated key to the system. This command will prompt you to set the password, which you will later while enrolling the key.

mokutil --import /root/module-signing/MOK.der

Reboot the system and then press any key to start the MOK management utility

Create a script called /root/module-signing/sign-vbox-modules to sign all the VirtualBox modules using the generated MOK key.

#!/bin/bash
for modfile in $(dirname $(modinfo -n vboxdrv))/*.ko; do
  echo "Signing $modfile"
  /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 \
                                /root/module-signing/MOK.priv \
                                /root/module-signing/MOK.der "$modfile"
done

Then, change the ownership of the script and run it. You can run this script whenever you update the system.

chmod 700 /root/module-signing/sign-vbox-modules
/root/module-signing/sign-vbox-modules

Finally, start the VirtualBox Linux kernel module service.

systemctl start vboxdrv

Launch VirtualBox

After the installation, you can launch VirtualBox by going to Activities >> Search for VirtualBox or running the virtualbox command in the terminal.

Conclusion

That’s All. I hope you have learned how to install VirtualBox on Fedora 36 / Fedora 35.