Mike's Tech & Photo Blog

One area where Parallels is much better than VirtualBox is in the ease of compacting a VM disk to what's actually in use. I've found that VM disks just keep increasing in size, regardless of what you might delete. Parallels makes compacting easy - all you do is select " Shrink... " from the Parallels menu. The situation with VirtualBox is more complicated 😀 While there is a command line "compact" option, this relies on unused stuff being zero - which it won't be for things that got deleted... However there is a tool ( zerofree ) which you can run in the VM and it sets all the free space on the disk to zero, which can then be compacted in VirtualBox. Here are the steps I've been using: Step 1: Install zerofree in the VM (Linux in my case): $ sudo apt install zerofree Step 2: Empty Trash and delete unneeded files Step 3: Boot into a recovery session Enter root password. Step 4: Remount disk as read-only # mount -n -o remount,...

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 U...