Posts Tagged ‘additions’

CentOS 8 / Redhat 8 insert additional guests additions to VM to enable Fullscreen, Copy / Paste and Shared Folder from host OS

Monday, January 10th, 2022

virtualbox-guest-additions-install-on-centos-8.3-linux-oracle-logo

My experience with enabling virtualbox additions guest tools on many of the separate Linux distributions throughout time is pretty bad as it always is a pain in the ass to enable fully functional full screen and copy paste for Virtualbox…
 
For those who installed it for a first time vbox guest addition tools for Virtualbox are additional software components added so the Emulated Operating system
could allow better screen resolution and better mouse integration support.

So far I've installed virtualbox additions tools to CentOS 7 and Debian Linux various releases and faced complications there as well.
Few days ago my colleague Georgi Stoyanov have installed CentOS 8.3 with current version of VirtualBox 6.1 (vesrsion from beginning of 2022) and he has also shared had issues with enabling the CentOS 8.3 Linux to work with guestadditions but eventually found a resolution.

Thus he has shared with me the solution and I share it with you, so hopefully someone else could enable Guesttools on his CentOS 8.3 with less digging online.
The error received is:

# ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Trying to install Guest Additions in RHEL 8.3.

VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel
modules. This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the modules for kernel
4.18.0-193.el8.x86_64.

VirtualBox Guest Additions: Look at /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log to find out what
went wrong
ValueError: File context for /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.0.20/other/mount.vboxsf already defined
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until
the system is restarted
Press Return to close this window…

No idea what to do next. Been trying for sometime.


To enable guestaddtions in CentOS 8.3, e.g. get arount the error you have to:


1. Install all necessery dependncies RPMs required by GuestAddition tools

 

# dnf install tar bzip2 kernel-devel-$(uname -r) kernel-headers perl gcc make elfutils-libelf-devel

# dnf -y install gcc automake make kernel-headers dkms bzip2 libxcrypt-compat kernel-devel perl

2.  Run below semanage and restorecon commands

 

# semanage fcontext -d /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-/other/mount.vboxsf
# restorecon /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-/other/mount.vboxsf

 

3.  Insert Virtualbox guest additions ISO and Run it

 

centos-insert-guest-additions-linux-virtualbox-screenshot
 

Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD Image

 

Click Run button to exec Vbox_GAs_6.0.18 script or run it manually

Run-Guest-Additions-screenshot-virtualbox-centos-8

or mount it manually with mount command and execute the VBoxLinuxAdditions.run to do so:

 

$ cd /run/media/`whoami`/VB*
$ su
# ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Installing additional modules …
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules.  This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until the system is restarted
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.

 

4. Reboot the VM
 

# reboot

5. Check and Confirm Virtualbox guest additions are properly installed and running
 

# lsmod | grep vbox

 

6. Enable Copy / Paste from to Virttual Machine e.g. Shared Clipboard / Shared Folder etc.

 

Share-Clipboard-in-Virtualbox-screenshot-centos-8

 

The three options most useful besides the support for FullScreen OS emulation by Virtualbox to enable right after
guesttools is on are:


1. Devices -> Shared Clipboard -> Bidirectional
2. Devices -> Drag and Drop -> Bidirectional
3. Devices -> Shared Folders -> Shared Folder Settings

 

How to enable VirtualBox Windows XP FullScreen with VboxGuestAdditions.iso on Ubuntu 11.10 Linux

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Enable_VirtualBox_Windows_XP-fullscreen-with-vboxguest-additions-iso
Right after installing Windows XP inside VirtualBox, I've found out everything works fine except the screen. Even though pressing (Right CTRL + F) was changing the Windows XP running window to FullScreen the XP screen was taking only a part of the whole screen area, where almost half of the screen was visible as simply staying blank.

A bit of research and I found the issue is caused by missing VirtualBoxGuestAdditions .

VBoxAdditions is a package which should be installed inside the VirtualBox by navigating to Devices -> Install Guest Additions

Virtualbox offers a download of a VboxGuestAdditions_4.1.2_Ubuntu.iso from url;
http://dlc.sun.edgesuite.net/virtualbox/4.1.2_Ubuntu/VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.2_Ubuntu.iso, anyways this download fails since the URL is currently unavailable.

To fix this two ways are possible:

1. Download VBoxGuestAdditions.iso from here and put it in directory /usr/share/virtualbox , e.g.:

root@ubuntu:~# cd /usr/share/virtualbox
root@ubuntu:/usr/share/virtualbox# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
...

2. Download and install virtualbox-guest-additions-iso_4.1.2-1_all.deb

root@ubuntu:~# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/virtualbox-guest-additions-iso_4.1.2-1_all.deb
...
root@ubuntu:~# dpkg -i virtualbox-guest-additions-iso_4.1.2-1_all.deb
...

Next to enable and install guest additions once again use menus:

Devices -> Install Guest Additions

VirtualBox Install Guest Additions Ubuntu Screenshot

The screen to appear next will be similar to:

VBox guest Additions windows Ubuntu

Further on follow the few dialogs to complete the installations and integration of Guest Additions and restart the Virtual machine and hooray the Windows will appear in Full screen in VirtualBox ! 😉

Linux: Virtualbox shared folder – how to share files from host to guest OS in Virtualbox

Monday, June 9th, 2014

add-shared-folder-in-virtualbox-linux-virtual-machine-on-top-of-windows-howto

If you just installed Debian / Ubuntu / CentOS Linux on top of Windows inside Virtualbox Virtual Machine and you're wondering how to Share files between Windows Host Operating System and Guest Operating System (Linux), here is how:

1. First make sure Virtualbox guest additions are installed

Besides installing Virtualbox guest additions which will enable you to resize VBox Window / enable copy paste between guest and host OS it is useful to have also Virtualbox extension packs which allows your Virtual Machine to be accessed remote via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) – the so called VRDP

2. From Virtualbox VM select folder on Windows hsot which will be shared

Selection of which Win folder to mount in Vbox is done via Virtualbox menus:
 

Machine -> Settings -> Shared Folder

virtualbox-windows-linux-guest-OS-how-to-shared_folder-screenshot2

virtualbox-windows-linux-guest-OS-how-to-shared_folder-screenshot

3. Launch Linux Virtual Machine and use mount command to mount shared folder

I like the practice of creating a new folder inside c:UsersgeorgiDownloadsShared_folder

Then fire up gnome-terminal / xterm whatever terminal you like and to mount shared folder inside emulated Linux issue:

mount -t vboxsf -o rw Shared_folder /mnt/Shared_folder/

 

This will mount Shared_folder in rw (read / write) mode, if you prefer to only mount Virtualbox Shared_folder for reading:

mount -t vboxsf -o ro Shared_folder /mnt/Shared_folder/

4. Configure Virtualbox Shared Folder to auto mount in Linux via fstab

As we all know automating mounts in Linux is done by adding line in /etc/fstab to automate Vbox Shared_Folder mount add new line to fstab like:
 

Shared_folder         /mnt/Shared_folder         vboxsf  defaults,rw    0 0

This will auto-mount in vbox shared folder read / write mode, to auto-mount it in read only mode:

Shared_folder         /mnt/Shared_folder         vboxsf  defaults,ro    0 0

  If you added it to /etc/fstab (and you didn't mount Shared Folder manually before), run

mount -a

to make Linux system re-read auto-mounts defined in fstab
 

The new mounted folder will appear in whenever said to be mounted. Enjoy 🙂