Is it possible to install VirtualBox with only the command line interface?

Question

I wanted to install VirtualBox 4.1 onto a remote Ubuntu server. I need only the command line interface of VirtualBox, I do not need the VirtualBox GUI. apt-get install virtualbox-4.1 brings itself the half of the KDE that I do not need (and it takes > 600 MB).

Is it possible to install VirtualBox without its UI? I am running Ubuntu Lucid.

Solution 1

The ready to use packages provided by the Virtual Box repositories will always install the full featured Virtual Box including the GUI Virtual Box Manager, and Guest Additions.

If we do not need these we may want to build Virtual Box from source, available for ther OSE edition for download from Oracle.

There is quite some documentation available from the maintainers. You may also find the configure options for setting up the build environment most helpful. Amongst others we do also have an option to build virtualbox with the option --build-headless for building without the GUI.

Solution 2

You could remove virtualbox-qt after installing virtualbox-4.1. However it's actually quite small in size, only 19 MB on my machine.