2 Installation details 2.3.3.6 Automatic installation of .rpm packages The .rpm format does not provide a configuration system comparable to the debconf system. See chapter 2.3.3.7, Automatic installation options, page 36 for how to set some common installation options provided by VirtualBox. 2.3.3.7 Automatic installation options To configure the installation process of our .deb and .rpm packages, you can create a response file named /etc/default/virtualbox. The automatic generation of the udev rule can be pre- vented by the following setting: INSTALL_NO_UDEV=1 The creation of the group vboxusers can be prevented by INSTALL_NO_GROUP=1 If the line INSTALL_NO_VBOXDRV=1 is specified, the package installer will not try to build the vboxdrv kernel module if no module fitting the current kernel was found. 2.3.4 The vboxusers group The Linux installers create the system user group vboxusers during installation. Any system user who is going to use USB devices from VirtualBox guests must be member of that group. A user can be made member of the group vboxusers through the GUI user/group management or at the command line with sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers username Note that adding an active user to that group will require that user to log out and back in again. This should be done manually after successful installation of the package. 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 execute 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 instances 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-username-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" 36