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I don't have much experience with Mac's and am having trouble getting Virtual Box installed.

I have a MacBook Pro (Late 2011) running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 and am trying to install Virtual Box 5.2.18. However each time the installer fails. Googling has revealed this is a common issue to do with "App Installation Security".

Following the guide from https://medium.com/@DMeechan/fixing-the-installation-failed-virtualbox-error-on-mac-high-sierra-7c421362b5b5 I have disabled things with sudo spctl --master-disable and can see and have selected Anywhere in Security & Privacy. However VirtualBox still fails to install.

  1. Has anyone got any other suggestions I can try to get VirtualBox installed?
  2. Happy to use anything other than VirtualBox so I can install an Ubuntu guest on this macBook?

UPDATE: Also tried using Homebrew - Same results.

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    What do the installer logs say when the failure occurs?
    – Spiff
    Oct 18, 2018 at 0:48
  • @Spiff Good question. Where do I find those?
    – TheEdge
    Oct 18, 2018 at 9:38

1 Answer 1

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As you said it's a common issue with installing Virtualbox on MacOS. That's weird you still have the error after the "Install anywhere" option is set in the security panel of the System Preferences.

If you're not scared to open the terminal, you can install Virtualbox like this (that's what I did):

  1. Install homebrew:

Copy-Paste this line into the terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
  1. Install virtualbox through the terminal:

With these two commands:

brew tap caskroom/cask
brew cask install virtualbox

Now you can launch Virtualbox from spotlight or launchpad (it is located in the Application folder as expected) After Virtualbox is installed, it should be easy to get an Ubuntu image and install it.

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  • Yep so home brew produces the same results as expected. After all HB is doing things from the command line anyway by downloading the install DMG image and trying to install it. So anyone got any other ideas. This is really frustrating. Can I run a VM any other way on a Mac without using VirtualBox? Something FREE preferably.
    – TheEdge
    Oct 23, 2018 at 7:30
  • Error: This software does not run on macOS versions older than Catalina.
    – Shrm
    Oct 2, 2023 at 12:09

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