Guest Additions

Sometimes you want to copy text between your regular desktop and the virtual machine you run in VirtualBox. For that, an “addon” from the Guest Additions CD is required. The following instructions are written in the terminal inside Debian. When entering passwords in the terminal, nothing should be seen. The dollar sign should not be written, but merely indicates that it is terminal commands. Here we go!

# Switch to the root-user
$ su
Password: # type your chosen root password

Now we can install programs and necessary tools. Run the following command to install the necessary tools:

$ apt-get install build-essential module-assistant dkms

We prepare for building a module:

$ m-a prepare

We should now mount the “Guest Additions CD Image”. It can get a bit messy here.

$ ls /media/cdrom

The above command lists what we have in the cdrom. If it is empty, we need to insert the disc. You do this via “Devices-> Insert Guest Additions CD Image …”. Try the above command again and see if files are listed. If it does, then just move on. If there is nothing there, you may need to “mount” the cdrom first:

$ mount /media/cdrom

Once the disc is in and files are listed, we can install Guest Additions:

# logged in as root
$ sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
#
# A lot of prints and some waiting time...
#

Reboot the VM:

$ sudo reboot

When this is done, we turn off the VM and enter VirtualBox “settings”. Under “General-> Advanced” we find “Shared Clipboard” and “Drag n drop”. Set both of them to “Bidirectional” and restart Debian.

Here is a video when I complete the steps above:

Sometimes it can be a bit of a hassle. In the video, the desktop did not want to play, but it was enough to restart Debian. Note that it is also possible to run in full screen.

Try doing this installation, it saves some time when you need to copy things.

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