What is the best way to use Virtualbox on Tumbleweed?

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Hello all,

When I was using Xubuntu, installing virtualbox from the Ubuntu repos was not a wise thing to do. The problems reported by people who were using it this way were numerous. The best way was to add the official Virtualbox repo and install it directly from there. It was working without issues.

Now that I have switched to Tumbleweed, I saw that the virtualbox release offered on the official VB repo is for Leap. TW is not mentioned anywhere on their site. I know of course that virtualbox is available in the main TW repo and I thought of asking what repo should I install virtualbox from.

Does the TW repo version work correctly? Some of the members here are definitely using virtualbox and I’d like to hear their opinion on this.

Also, can virtualbox be considered as stable on TW since the system receives so many updates? Does it break because of them?

Thank you.

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I use VB from the standard OSS TW repo without any issues. Breakages are extremely rare. So simply perform a
sudo zypper in virtualbox

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3

Ditto
Use TW version

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@hui @caf4926

Thank you both for your responses.

Is the VirtualBox Extension Pack included in the TW repo installation or do I still need to download and install it from the Virtualbox site after the main installation is finished?

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If you really need the extension pack (special use cases as explained here), you need to download it from the VB site.

The guest additions are available via the Tumbleweed repo.

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Let me hop in with a different approach:
Install and use virt-manager for KVM/Qemu. Never worry again about kernel updates and so on, since the virtualization is already built into the kernel (each kernel). As a longtime VirtualBox user, I switched to KVM years ago. Performance, flexibility are way better.

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@knurpht

I’m afraid I don’t have a very good knowledge on how to use KVM/Qemu on openSUSE. I don’t know how to install and configure it the way I know virtualbox. I used KVM for a little while back in the Xubuntu days but that was a long time ago.

I’d appreciate it if you could send me links to documentation or videos on how to educate myself on the subject. The fact that I know how to use virtualbox quite well, doesn’t stop me from learning something new and possibly better. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you.

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  • From YaST Virtualization, pick the KVM option, and let it install everything
  • Also in Yast - Security and Users - Users and Groups, add your user to the libvirt group
  • Also in YaST - Service Manager - set the libvirt service to enabled and “start at boot”
  • Fire up virt-manager from your desktop and off you go.
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@knurpht

I followed the steps you said but I encountered some differences.

  1. After the installation, there was no libvirtd.service on the system. The only related service I found was libvirt-guests.service which I started and enabled using systemctl enable --now libvirt-guests which was successful.
  2. YaST2 could not create the necessary bridge in Network Manager since Network Manager was in use. It showed a message about it. The bridge has to be created manually now.

I added myself to the libvirt group successfully.

Are we dealing with a simple name change for the service or is it something else I have to take care of?

The Virtual Machine Manager seems to start successfully.

Thank you.

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So, it works? You are able to create a VM?
Please show

sudo systemctl status libvirt*
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I used that back in 2015-2018, and I was glad to move on to VirtualBox. Sure, KVM/QEMU lets you emulate pretty much any hardware; if you have deep understanding of that hardware and you are willing to work in non-human-readable file formats like XML. And you might have to debug your borked emulated hardware setup which is no fun.

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Sure, but most users here will probably not go that far. And re. XML: Done that, been there, don’t wanna go blind.

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@shundhammer I have a few MacOS instances running… :nerd_face:

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@knurpht

The service is active.

Computer:~ # systemctl status libvirt*
â—Ź libvirt-guests.service - libvirt guests suspend/resume service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/libvirt-guests.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: active (exited) since Wed 2025-12-10 17:56:30 EET; 3h 16min ago
 Invocation: 55b9c150e29b4920ac3e65901c72a102
       Docs: man:libvirt-guests(8)
             https://libvirt.org/
    Process: 1546 ExecStart=/usr/libexec/libvirt-guests.sh start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 1546 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        CPU: 6ms

Notice: journal has been rotated since unit was started, output may be incomplete.
Computer:~ #

I haven’t created any vm yet and I don’t know if the network bridge that has not been created yet is necessary for this. I think it’s not but I’m not sure. The vm manager says it’s connecting successfully to QEMU/KVM.

These are the messages I see when it starts:

Dec 10 21:18:41 Computer systemd[1]: Starting libvirt QEMU daemon...
Dec 10 21:18:41 Computer systemd[1]: Started libvirt QEMU daemon.
Dec 10 21:18:41 Computer systemd[1]: Starting libvirt storage daemon...
Dec 10 21:18:41 Computer systemd[1]: Started libvirt storage daemon.
Dec 10 21:18:41 Computer systemd[1]: Starting libvirt network daemon...
Dec 10 21:18:42 Computer systemd[1]: Started libvirt network daemon.
Dec 10 21:18:42 Computer systemd[1]: Starting libvirt nodedev daemon...
Dec 10 21:18:42 Computer systemd[1]: Started libvirt nodedev daemon.

And these are the messages I see a few seconds after it’s closed:

Dec 10 21:21:03 Computer systemd[1]: virtnetworkd.service: Deactivated successfully.
Dec 10 21:21:03 Computer systemd[1]: virtqemud.service: Deactivated successfully.
Dec 10 21:21:03 Computer systemd[1]: virtstoraged.service: Deactivated successfully.
Dec 10 21:21:03 Computer systemd[1]: virtnodedevd.service: Deactivated successfully.
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things may have changed since I installed. IIRC worked from own notes from ~6 years ago.

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