VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. You'll probably want to add the following lines to your rc.local: # Start vboxdrv if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv start fi This will load the support kernel module for VirtualBox. You should add similar "stop" lines to your rc.local_shutdown. By default you have to create a vboxusers group, for example with groupadd -g 215 vboxusers and make your user a member of that group. Alternatively, you can run the script with VBOXUSERS=no to allow all users of your system to start virtual machines. By default VirtualBox will be compiled with hardening enabled. That means all binaries will be run suid root, which is the default behaviour of upstream packages. However, you are still able to disable this by passing HARDENING=no to the script. When hardening is enabled, VBOXUSERS is automatically set to yes. If the VirtualBox Additions ISO is available in the same directory as the build script, it will be included in the package and placed under /usr/share/virtualbox/. Same goes for the UserManual They can be downloaded from: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.1.4/VBoxGuestAdditions_2.1.4.iso http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.1.4/UserManual.pdf Since 2.0.0 there is a Qt4 GUI, which is enabled by default. To disable it pass QT4=no to the script. An older, no longer maintained Qt3 GUI is also available but disabled by default (no new features have been added to this since 2.0). To enable it, pass QT3=yes to the script. Beware: the Qt3 GUI has already been removed from svn trunk, and 2.2.0 will only have a Qt4 GUI available. For pulseaudio support, pass PULSE=yes to the build script. This requires pulseaudio to be installed. This requires acpica, and the virtualbox-kernel package is needed at runtime.