How to run Virtualbox on Fedora 42 Workstation (It does not start)

Ask Fedora
1

Hi @all,

when fedora 42 came out i installed the KDE edition and on this system i installed virtualbox from rpmfusion. It works fine. Now i decided to reinstall with fedora 42 workstation and on this system with Gnome DE virtualbox does not start at all. Is there an known issue and a fix?

Thanks for helping me out.

2

When reporting a problem it best to provide enough detail (e.g., the output from inxi -Fzxx as pre-formatted text) to allow others with similar hardware to reproduce the issue. Did you preserve your existing /home when installing Workstation?

There may be useful details available using journalctl. In a terminal, run journalctl --no-hostname --follow and see what messages appear when you attempt to start the GNOME DE.

If you preserved your home directory when installing Workstation, there may be residual configuration appropriate to KDE. Try creating a new user login with default settings to see if VirtualBox starts for the pristine new user login.

3

You might try invoking virtualbox from command line with
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 virtualbox

(found via this recent thread)

4

On Fedora 42 currently VirtualBox runs properly only under Plasma Desktop. The available options in my experience are:

  1. Uninstall VirtualBox from rpmfusion repository and install VirtualBox for Fedora 41 from Oracle website. In that way you have VirtualBox in your locale.
  2. Prepend LANG=C.UTF-8 or LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to virtualbox invocation (It works better than LCL_ALL= etc., which in some cases fails). It works but it uses English, of course.
5

Hi

Gnome uses “Boxes”, same as Virtual box only different.

6

Error message?

7

You are right but in my experience the version from Oracle runs fine without further action. I don’t know what’s the differences between the rpm-fusion package and the one from Oracle.

It’s not the first time i had issues with the rpm-fusion package.

Thanks for trying to help.

@clivewi
Gnome does not “use” Boxes, it’s just another soulution to run vm’s. VirtualBox has a quite unique possibilty for bridged networking over wifi which is very important for my workflow.

8

For me too the Oracle version runs just fine out of the box. It is rather strange because the code base is identical, both rpm-fusion and Oracle report the same build number (168469), but the rpm-fusion version uses kmod to recompile the kernel module. Is it because of that? Or is it because of some difference on the libraries used, or in the order they are used? In any case until last time I checked Oracle didn’t provide a FC42 version. But as the FC41 version works properly, it’s irrelevant.