How to Install VirtualBox an Arch

There are two ways if you wan't to try a new Linx distro without losing your beloved arch install. First boot the distro on a Live USB. Or second use a VM. In this guide I am going to show you how to setup VirtualBox - a VM - on Archlinux

First, we are going to start of by installing the VirtualBox package. If you are prompted to select a package, choose your default (just press "Enter").

# Update the pacman repository cache
$ sudo pacman -Sy
# Then install the virtualbox packages
$ sudo pacman -S virtualbox

If you now would try to run VirtualBox it would fail because we first need to load the VirtualBox kernel module. To load this module automatically on boot, we'll create a file in the /etc/modules-load.d/ directory:

$ sudo nano /etc/modules-load.d/virtualbox.conf
# virtualbox.conf
vboxdrv

Then reboot:

$ sudo reboot

You'll need to add your useer to the vboxusers group so that you can use VirtualBox without root.

$ sudo usermod -aG vboxusers $(whoami)

Then reboot again:

$ sudo reboot

Finally you can start Virtualbox over your DE or through the therminal:

$ virtualbox

In this guide I showed you how to setup VirtualBox on Arch.

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