Thursday, March 11, 2010

How to install Guest Additions for Ubuntu Guest in Virtualbox

Guest Additions are very useful in VirtualBox (or any other virtualization software in general), it installs virtual adapters for your hardware and enables the following:
  • Better graphics support (very useful when resizing the desktop or changing the guest's resolution)
  • Folder sharing between the host and the guest (you can refer to this article for a how-to)
  • Mouse Integration
Maybe other features as well which I don't know. To install the guest addtions, you can simply follow the following five steps:
  1. Click Devices->Install Guest Additions, this will mount a virtual cdrom containing the files from which we will install the guest addtions.
  2. Open a terminal and navigate to the folder containing the guest additions "cd /media/cdrom"
  3. Run the guest addition installer "sudo sh VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run"
  4. Wait till the additions are installed and the kernel modules are compiled, note that this may take a few minutes.
  5. Restart the Ubuntu guest.
This article is dedicated to my cousin Midoooz, to use it in his first virtual machine :)

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