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Oracle VM VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by German software company innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products. It is installed on an existing host operating system; within this application, additional guest operating systems, each known as a Guest OS, can be loaded and run, each with its own virtual environment. In plain English: you can basically install Linux as a guest OS inside Windows or the other way around, and so on without affecting the currently running OS.

The Virtualbox (non-free) repository is finally available for Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx (kind of late I'd say). You can add it using the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lucid non-free"
wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Then install it:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.2



A note: VirtualBox non-free means it's not open source, it doesn't mean you have to pay for it.


But VirtualBox 3.2 beta 2 is not available in this repository so if you want to download Beta 2, you can do it manually from HERE. VirtualBox 3.2 Beta 2 comes with support for MacOS X, meaning you can install the original MacOS X in your Linux or Windows VirtualBox. However, please note that I tried that and for some reason the installation feezes (maybe my ISO image was corrupt, I'm not sure though).


Update: VirtualBox 3.2 final is now available in the official VirtualBox repository mentioned above.


[Thanks to blog.bedendo.eti.br]