Skip to main content

VirtualBox: Install Guest Additions in Linux VM

As mentioned in my previous post, I found VirtualBox pretty easy to install and make work. My only real difficulty was figuring out how to install the "Guest Additions" on Linux, as this is poorly documented. The "Guest Additions" are the VirtualBox equivalent of the "*-tools" of the commercial VM's and provide closer integration between the VM and host environment, so you usually want to install them.

Here are the steps I used to install the "Guest Additions" on Debian 8 & 9 with VirtualBox 6.1.*:

Step 1: Prepare for building a kernel module

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential module-assistant
$ sudo m-a prepare

Step 2: Run the Guest Additions install

  • Click the VirtualBox Devices menu on the VM.
  • Click "Insert Guest Additions CD image..."
  • Run the installer:
$ mount /media/cdrom
$ sudo sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
$ sudo reboot

Step 3: Fix permissions issue with shared folders

Unfortunately when you share a host folder with the VM, VirtualBox uses a group that normal users don't have (vboxsf), so I also added my user to that group:

$ sudo adduser <your user> vboxsf

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Work in new Top Trumps Birds of Prey Pack

The new Top Trumps "Birds of Prey" pack has my picture illustrating the Secretary Bird card 😀 Here's the original picture: From Flickr
Post a Comment
Read more

On BBC Springwatch !

BBC Springwatch featured one of my Goldfinch pictures last night: Goldfinch on Springwatch Shame they spelt my name wrong though! See the original on Flickr.
Post a Comment
Read more

Emacs and MacOS Catalina

Catalina introduced a lot of security changes and the most intrusive is probably all the popups asking to give permission for apps to access directories under Home, like Documents. Worse still, apps which weren't written to handle the new security measures might just fail silently with no clues for the user. A solution is to give apps like Emacs "Full Disk Access" under "Security & Privacy" in Preferences, to give unfettered access to your files and avoid all the popups and silent failures. Sounds good, but that doesn't actually work for Emacs because "Emacs" in the app bundle is actually a Ruby script which decides which flavour of Emacs executable to run. This never mattered before, but it does under Catalina because MacOS thinks the executable is /usr/bin/ruby . Conventional wisdom is therefore to give "Full Disk Access" to Ruby. While this does work, I've always been uncomfortable giving all Ruby scripts full access...
Post a Comment
Read more