Why was the virtualbox package removed from the 14.04 repository?

I'm having some problems trying to run my Windows XP virtual machine after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 today. When I tried to start it a message dialog was displayed saying that the kernel drivers aren't installed, in concrete they should be provided by a packaged named virtualbox-dkms. I decided to reinstall virtualbox so dependencies will get auto resolved, but the execution of command (sudo apt-get install --reinstall virtualbox) resulted in a message similar to: "cannot reinstall package because the package cannot be downloaded" (I'm reproducing the message by memory).

Then I tried using synaptic package manager gui. The package virtualbox and its dependencies are there, but without version number or description. Then I switched to main servers, and tried to update, now the package isn't even there anymore.

It may be a problem with my sources.list file but also may be that for some reason I don't know they decide to remove virtualbox from repository.

I think I will try to download the packages from the virtual box site for now but in Ubuntu I always installed virtualbox from repository.

Solution 1:

In Ubuntu 14.04, Virtualbox package version 4.3.10 is available in multiverse repository. So enable multiverse repository and install virtualbox through apt-get.

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox

How i know that information?

$ apt-cache policy virtualbox
virtualbox:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 4.3.10-dfsg-1
  Version table:
     4.3.10-dfsg-1 0
        500 http://ftp.cuhk.edu.hk/pub/Linux/ubuntu/ trusty/multiverse amd64 Package

Solution 2:

It seems the problem is that VirtualBox is not entirely free software anymore. Because of this, it was moved from universe (unsupported free software) to multiverse (unsupported non-free software).

From Ubuntu bug #1164654:

Please move the virtualbox package from universe to multiverse in raring.
SInce virtualbox 4.2 building the BIOS image requires a non-free compiler (Open Watcom).
Upstream provides pre-built BIOS images which is used instead.

Solution 3:

I was able to install it just now with the command: sudo apt-get install virtualbox. It just took about 3 minutes and it is done.