VirtualBox Removal – Why Was the VirtualBox Package Removed from the 14.04 Repository?

aptrelease-managementvirtualbox

I'm having some problems trying to run my Windows XP virtual machine after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 today. When I tried to start it a message dialog was displayed saying that the kernel drivers aren't installed, in concrete they should be provided by a packaged named virtualbox-dkms. I decided to reinstall virtualbox so dependencies will get auto resolved, but the execution of command (sudo apt-get install --reinstall virtualbox) resulted in a message similar to: "cannot reinstall package because the package cannot be downloaded" (I'm reproducing the message by memory).

Then I tried using synaptic package manager gui. The package virtualbox and its dependencies are there, but without version number or description. Then I switched to main servers, and tried to update, now the package isn't even there anymore.

It may be a problem with my sources.list file but also may be that for some reason I don't know they decide to remove virtualbox from repository.

I think I will try to download the packages from the virtual box site for now but in Ubuntu I always installed virtualbox from repository.

Best Answer

In Ubuntu 14.04, Virtualbox package version 4.3.10 is available in multiverse repository. So enable multiverse repository and install virtualbox through apt-get.

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox

How i know that information?

$ apt-cache policy virtualbox
virtualbox:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 4.3.10-dfsg-1
  Version table:
     4.3.10-dfsg-1 0
        500 http://ftp.cuhk.edu.hk/pub/Linux/ubuntu/ trusty/multiverse amd64 Package
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