Helping All, One Keystroke at a Time

So I was wondering the other day about how to access the host file sytstem from within a Linux VirtualBox guest. It can’t be that hard as I can access my host filesystem from within a Windows guest that I have using a \\VBOXSRV\share_name at the Windows “Run” prompt. But how do I do this in Linux? I found this thread that tells me exactly how.

mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] share_name mountpoint
Just use that command above and make sure that you have the guest additions installed otherwise mount will have no idea what type of filesystem "vboxsf" is.

I just recently installed a Gentoo guest into VirtualBox and wanted to have seamless desktop integration + accelerated video. All I had to do was install the VirtualBox guest additions which can be done one of two ways:

• Mount the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso and run the VboxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run binary. This will install the guest addtions (Note I am using a 64 bit Linux build — change amd64 to x86 if you are running 32 bit Linux).
• Install the VirtualBox guest additions available from the guest’s native package manager. In Arch Linux the package is called virtualbox_bin_additions for the non-OSE VirtualBox and virtualbox_additions for the OSE VirtualBox.

Then, once one of the above is complete,? edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf on the guest with the following contents:

Section "Device"
  Identifier?? ?"Configured Video Device"
  Driver?? ??? ?"vboxvideo"
EndSection

If you already have a “Device” section just change the Driver line accordingly. With just those lines above I get mouse, keyboard and video integration including resizing of the guest resolution when I resize the host window size.

Restart X on the guest and you should be good to go. On the gentoo wiki is suggests that you add the mouse configuration also to the xorg.conf but this is not needed as the mouse is automagically detected (At least with the 10.0 LiveDVD anyways).