The easiest way to start an program is by running the program of your choice (VirtualBox, VBoxManage, or VBoxHeadless) from a terminal. These are symbolic links to VBox.sh that start the required program for you.

The following detailed instructions should only be of interest if you want to execute without installing it first. You should start by compiling the vboxdrv kernel module and inserting it into the Linux kernel. consists of a service daemon, VBoxSVC, and several application programs. The daemon is automatically started if necessary. All applications will communicate with the daemon through UNIX local domain sockets. There can be multiple daemon instances under different user accounts and applications can only communicate with the daemon running under the user account as the application. The local domain socket resides in a subdirectory of your system's directory for temporary files called .vbox-<username>-ipc. In case of communication problems or server startup problems, you may try to remove this directory.

All applications (VirtualBox, VBoxManage, and VBoxHeadless) require the directory to be in the library path, as follows:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./VBoxManage showvminfo "Windows XP"