How to Install, Run and Uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux

VMware Player and VirtualBox are two cool and free full virtualization solutions and both can run on top of a Linux host. In this post, I introduce how to install, run, and uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux.

VMware Player

Install VMware Player

Download the installation bundle from VMware’s website. For example, the file we download is: VMware-Player-4.0.0-471780.x86_64.bundle .

Install needed kernel header and devel packages

# yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel

Run the bundle file

# sh VMware-Player-4.0.0-471780.x86_64.bundle

Then just follow the instruction of the GUI of the VMware installer, and you can finish the installation.

Run VMware Player

Just execute

$ vmplayer

Start a virtual machine just by one command

$ vmplayer /path/to/virtual/machine/config.vmx 

Give the path to the virtual machine configuration file (a .vmx file under the virtual machine’s directory) to vmplayer as its parameter.

Uninstall VMware Player

VMware installer provides the method to uninstall VMware products. We can use this tool

# vmware-installer  --uninstall-product vmware-player

It has a GUI and just follow its instruction to finish the uninstallation.

VirtualBox

Install VirtualBox

We use VirtualBox’s repository for Fedora here. We use VirtualBox-4.1 as the example.

Download the repository file.

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo

Install VirtualBox using yum

# yum install VirtualBox-4.1

Related (for UEFI Secure Boot systems): VirtualBox report “Kernel driver not installed” on Fedora 21.

Run VirtualBox

Just execute

$ virtualbox

Start a virtual machine just by one command

# VBoxManage startvm name_of_the_virtual_machine

VBoxManager use the virtual machine’s name as its parameter. The name can be found from VirtualBox’s virtual machine list.

Uninstall VirtualBox

As installing VirtualBox, we can uninstall (erase) it using yum

# yum erase VirtualBox-4.1

---

Previous comments:

frogola, OCT 11, 2012 AT 11:07 PM
How would you compare the two products, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each? Which one do you prefer?

Zhiqiang Ma, OCT 12, 2012 AT 10:01 AM
On Linux platforms from my own experience, VMWare player delivers better performance than VirtualBox. However, VirtualBox is easier to setup/upgrade/etc. Considering the higher performance of PCs, I like VirtualBox more.