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Oracle VM VirtualBox – Install Virtualbox 6.1 in Ubuntu 19.10

By Sourabh /  Category: How To, Ubuntu

Oracle VirtualBox 6.1 released. How to install Virtualbox 6.1 in Ubuntu 19.10 and Ubuntu 19.04. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.

VirtualBox 6.1.0

VirtualBox 6.1.0 (released December 10 2019) is a major update. The following major new features were added:

  • Implemented support for importing a virtual machine from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
  • Extended support for exporting a virtual machine to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, allowing the creation of multiple virtual machines without re-uploading. Also added option to export a VM to the cloud using the more efficient variant “paravirtialized”, and to specify free-form tags for cloud images
  • Virtualization core: Support for nested hardware-virtualization on Intel CPUs (starting with 5th generation Core i, codename Broadwell), so far tested only with guest running VirtualBox
  • Graphics: New style 3D support (with VBoxSVGA and VMSVGA) remains, old style 3D support (with VBoxVGA) has been completely removed
  • Shared Clipboard: Implemented experimental support for file transfers (Windows hosts/guests only at the moment). Needs to be enabled via VBoxManage (disabled by default). In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
  • Virtualization core: Drop recompiler, i.e. running VMs now needs a CPU supporting hardware virtualization
  • Runtime: Works now on hosts with many CPUs (limit now 1024)
  • Appliance and Cloud Import: Add field for defining firmware type (not part of OVF spec and thus manual in the Appliance case, for OCI it is automatically taken from the instance information)
  • GUI: Improved the VISO creation and file manager dialogs
  • GUI: Virtual machine list of VirtualBox Manager was improved. Machine groups are now more obvious visually and VM search functionality has been improved. Global Tools element can now be pinned in place, to avoid scrolling it with rest of machine list
  • GUI: Virtual machine details pane is now extended with embedded editors for selected VM attributes, allowing user to edit them on-the-fly byi clicking corresponding hyper-links without opening VM settings dialog
  • GUI: Details pane provides more complete information
  • GUI: Internal medium enumeration routines were optimized to reduce the load and optimize the performance in cases when user have lots of media registered. Also, we again allowed to add existing media (and create new) via Virtual Media Manager
  • GUI: More consistent medium selection (both showing known images and allowing to select using the file picker)
  • GUI: VM storage settings page was adjusted a bit in usability regard. User is now allowed to change controller bus type and can move attachments between the controllers by using drag and drop
  • GUI: Storage and Network settings pages bug-fixes and usability optimization
  • GUI: Added a new soft (virtual) keyboard enabling arbitrary keyboard input to guests, including multimedia keys
  • GUI: Fixed crash in cloud related wizards when accessibility functionality was enabled
  • GUI: Show VM CPU load as part of status bar CPU indicator
  • GUI: Improved and extended the Session Information dialog
  • GUI: Fixed/improved mouse pointer scaling
  • GUI: Some issues related to mouse integration cursor scaling were addressed (bug #14366), more to go
  • GUI: Fix and unify geometry save/restore in various dialogs
  • GUI: Added the missing restriction options for disabling new functionality such as the VISO creator
  • GUI: Popup messages mouse click fix
  • Graphics: Remove 3D support for VBoxVGA (old one deprecated with 6.0)
  • Graphics: Additional texture format support on Windows host
  • Graphics: Improved fix for flickering on Windows host
  • Input: Added support for horizontal scrolling in the PS/2 mouse device using the IntelliMouse Explorer protocol. Note that this support is automatically used by Linux guests but not by Windows guests
  • vboximg-mount: Experimental support for direct read-only access to NTFS, FAT and ext2/3/4 filesystems inside a disk image without the need for support on the host
  • vboximg-mount: Now also available on Linux host
  • Storage: Experimental support for virtio-scsi, for both hard disks and optical drives (including boot support in BIOS)
  • Storage: For optical drive emulation fix empty host drive crash
  • USB: Improvements for EHCI controller implementation
  • USB: Filter can now specify port path, uniquely identifying a port in a system
  • NAT: Fix TFTP OACK response, send only if request has options
  • NAT Network: Use non-blocking sockets on Linux for accepted incoming connections (port forwarding)
  • PCnet-ISA: Added new network adapter type, currently CLI only
  • Audio: Allow changing the host audio backend while the VM is in saved state
  • ACPI: Report NVMe controller
  • VGA: Improve hardware and BIOS compatibility
  • VBoxSVGA/VMSVGA: Support YUV2 and related texture formats with hosts using OpenGL (macOS and Linux), which accelerates video playback when 3D is enabled by delegating the color space conversion to the host GPU
  • VBoxSVGA/VMSVGA: Several drawing fixes for the 3D case
  • VMSVGA 3D: Fixed OpenGL compressed textures
  • VBoxManage: More cloud functionality coverage, e.g. starting a cloud instance
  • VBoxManage: As part of the guest control feature support moving multiple source files/directories to a target directory
  • Guest Control/VBoxManage: Added support for specifying multiple sources when renaming guest files
  • VBoxManage: Show “unrestricted guest” and “nested HW virtualization” CPU features when listing the host information
  • API: Reduce the amount of leftovers from Move VM function
  • Shared Clipboard: Implemented experimental support for file transfers for Linux hosts on Windows guests (disabled by default)
  • SMBIOS: Store system UUID in little endian format which is the default for new VMs, while existing VMs stick to the old VirtualBox behavior of storing them in big endian format for backwards compatibility to avoid breaking the activation status of Windows VMs
  • VBoxSDL frontend: Fixed running on Windows hosts
  • macOS host: Fix VM crashes (most visible on macOS Catalina)
  • Linux host: Improve vboxweb systemd service dependency information
  • Linux host: Drop PCI passthrough, the current code is too incomplete (cannot handle PCIe devices at all), i.e. not useful enough
  • Linux host and guest: Support Linux 5.4 (bug #18945)
  • Linux host and guest: Force disabling of kernel module signing during build (user can do it afterwards)
  • Windows host: When possible, distinguish USB devices by port number; helps with accurate capturing of devices when multiple otherwise identical devices are connected
  • Windows Guest Additions: Many fixes for drawing problems in the driver for VBoxSVGA
  • Windows Guest Additions: Fixes for legacy VBoxVGA adapter, restore previously working cases
  • Windows Guest Additions: Restore VHWA functionality for VBoxSVGA
  • Windows guest: DXVA implementation for WDDM driver
  • Documentation: Updated supported host operating systems, added few new manual pages (more to come later)
  • EFI: Switch to newer firmware code base and add NVRAM support, should improve compatibility with OSes significantly
  • EFI: Added support for booting from APFS
  • EFI: Added support for non-standard SATA and NVMe boot device paths created by OS X
  • EFI: Modified updated EFI code base to support older OS X guests again

Install Virtualbox 6.1 in Ubuntu


sudo apt-get update
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list'
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-6.1

NOTE: Replace virtualbox-6.1 by virtualbox-6.0 or virtualbox-5.2 to install the latest VirtualBox 6.0 or 5.2 build.

NOTE: Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list. According to your distribution, replace ” with ‘eoan’, ‘bionic’, ‘xenial’, ‘buster’, ‘stretch’, or ‘jessie’ (older versions of VirtualBox supported different distributions)


deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian contrib

NOTE: experiencing The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG … when refreshing the packages from the repository?


# sudo -s -H
# apt-get clean
# rm /var/lib/apt/lists/*
# rm /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/*
# apt-get clean
# apt-get update