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<topic xml:lang="en-us" id="startingvboxonlinux">
               <title>Starting <ph conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> on Linux</title>
               
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                  <p>The easiest way to start an <ph conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> program is by
      running the program of your choice (<userinput>VirtualBox</userinput>, <userinput>VBoxManage</userinput>, or
        <userinput>VBoxHeadless</userinput>) from a terminal. These are symbolic links to <userinput>VBox.sh</userinput>
      that start the required program for you. </p>
                  <p>The following detailed instructions should only be of interest if you want to execute <ph
        conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> without installing it first. You should start by compiling the
        <userinput>vboxdrv</userinput> kernel module and inserting it into the Linux kernel. <ph
        conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> consists of a service daemon, <userinput>VBoxSVC</userinput>,
      and several application programs. The daemon is automatically started if necessary. All <ph
        conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> 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
        <filepath>.vbox-&lt;username&gt;-ipc</filepath>. In case of communication problems or server startup problems,
      you may try to remove this directory. </p>
                  <p>All <ph conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> applications
        (<userinput>VirtualBox</userinput>, <userinput>VBoxManage</userinput>, and <userinput>VBoxHeadless</userinput>)
      require the <ph conkeyref="vbox-conkeyref-phrases/product-name"/> directory to be in the library path, as follows: </p>
                  <pre xml:space="preserve">LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./VBoxManage showvminfo "Windows XP"</pre>
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