2 Installation details As installation of VirtualBox varies depending on your host operating system, we provide instal- lation instructions in four separate chapters for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris, respec- tively. 2.1 Installing on Windows hosts 2.1.1 Prerequisites For the various versions of Windows that we support as host operating systems, please refer to chapter 1.4, Supported host operating systems, page 13. In addition, Windows Installer 1.1 or higher must be present on your system. This should be the case if you have all recent Windows updates installed. 2.1.2 Performing the installation The VirtualBox installation can be started • either by double-clicking on its executable file (contains both 32- and 64-bit architectures) • or by entering VirtualBox.exe -extract on the command line. This will extract both installers into a temporary directory in which you’ll then find the usual .MSI files. Then you can do a msiexec /i VirtualBox-version-MultiArch_x86|amd64.msi to perform the installation. In either case, this will display the installation welcome dialog and allow you to choose where to install VirtualBox to and which components to install. In addition to the VirtualBox applica- tion, the following components are available: USB support This package contains special drivers for your Windows host that VirtualBox re- quires to fully support USB devices inside your virtual machines. Networking This package contains extra networking drivers for your Windows host that VirtualBox needs to support Bridged Networking (to make your VM’s virtual network cards accessible from other machines on your physical network). Python Support This package contains Python scripting support for the VirtualBox API (see chapter 11, VirtualBox programming interfaces, page 163). For this to work, an already working Windows Python installation on the system is required.1 Depending on your Windows configuration, you may see warnings about “unsigned drivers” or similar. Please select “Continue” on these warnings as otherwise VirtualBox might not function correctly after installation. 1See, for example, http://www.python.org/download/windows/. 29