Virtualbox Shared Folders Win7 Host Mint 15 XFCE Guest

[anothermuggle]

Is anyone able to help me get the shared folders working in a Mint 15 XFCE guest from a Win7 host?

The guest additions are installed by default, right?

When I set up the shared folders it looks like they are mounted in /media/<share_name> but I can't get access to them.

Cheers,
AnotherMuggle

[altair4]

They are accessible only to members of the vboxsf group so you need to add yourself to that group:

Code: Select all

sudo gpasswd -a your-user-name vboxsf

Then logout ( of the virtual machine ) and login again for the group membership to take affect.

[trapperjohn]

The guest additions are installed by default, right?

No, from the guest, install from the devices menu.

[anothermuggle]

They are accessible only to members of the vboxsf group so you need to add yourself to that group:

Code: Select all

sudo gpasswd -a your-user-name vboxsf

Then logout ( of the virtual machine ) and login again for the group membership to take affect.

Thanks man, this did the trick

[anothermuggle]

The guest additions are installed by default, right?

No, from the guest, install from the devices menu.

I installed from a standard iso and it seems to be installed by default.

[altair4]

The guest additions are installed by default, right?

No, from the guest, install from the devices menu.

I installed from a standard iso and it seems to be installed by default.

The answer from a Mint perspective is somewhat complicated. Mint automatically installs and apparently enables guest additions through the use of vurtualbox-guest-utils. And it will work but there's just one problem - it's at the wrong level.

I install VirtualBox from Oracle directly and I'm at 4.2.12. If I install Mint15 into VBox the guest additions are at 4.2.10. Will it work with the main application being at one level and the guest additions at another level? Yes. Is it the way I would run it? No.

So although trapperjohn's post is not technically correct in this case his advice should be followed.

Either way I completely missed that part of your original post so shame on me.

[anothermuggle]

This is interesting. I noted when trying to install Guest Additions from the Devices menu that it warned the installed version is newer than the one I was attempting to install and advised I cancel the installation. Where does that leave me?

[altair4]

What version of VirtualBox did you install on Win7?

[anothermuggle]

What version of VirtualBox did you install on Win7?

I think the latest version: 4.2.16 r86992

EDIT: My appologies, this is in fact what the message says:

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 4.2.16 Guest Additions for Linux............
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
You appear to have a version of the VBoxGuestAdditions software
on your system which was installed from a different source or using a
different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your
Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly
recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before
installing this version. If this is simply an older or a damaged
installation you may safely proceed.

Do you wish to continue anyway? [yes or no]

[altair4]

That's normal. It's because Mint installs one of it's own. I ignore the error message and hit yes.

[altair4]

Before shutting down for the day I thought I'd pass this along. If you are having any reservations about installing the oracle guest additions I took one of my MintVM's and removed the only virtaulbox installed packages Mint has on the guest:

Code: Select all

virtualbox-guest-dkms
virtualbox-guest-utils
virtualbox-guest-x11

Then I ran the guest additions installer and reboot. Doesn't seem to harm anything to have them removed if you want to make the error message go away..

I don't know what trapperjohn's experience is with this particular issue but long ago I became certifiably insane so I have 23 virtual machines on this box and 12 of them are Mint. I've never removed the pre-installed Mint version of guest additions before installing the real one.

And BTW it seems only Mint does this sort of thing.

[trapperjohn]

I have always removed all of the package manager's versions for virtual-box applications. Subsequently, I install VBox from the Oracle site (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads. Most often I choose the All distributions flavor but I have used the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installer as well. While at the Oracle site I also download the extension pack.

I have never had a problem getting to a native install's share from a Windows guest (shows up in networks). With some linux VMs on linux hosts there is a bit of mounting gymnastics involved.

[rraheja]

Just wanted to share my experience, even though it was on the KDE desktop version.

I did a full upgrade on my base Linux Mint 15 KDE Guest install and also installed the latest VirtualBox Guest Additions Installer 4.2.16 on a Win7 Host. When attempting to reboot, it hung and upon restarting the machine, it gave some messages on the guest additions and then hung after the "CPU interrupt" message.

After yet another full reinstall of the OS, but this time NOT reinstalling the guest additions (and just staying with the packaged version), it works.
I create VMs at work for public distribution and have found that upgrading the Guest additions when there isn't a perfect match with the kernel headers can cause issues e.g. at my work VM I have lost the ability to auto-resize after upgrading and then updating/installing the guest additions.

[altair4]

Since there seems to be some confusion over this I thought I'd go to the source: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54881

The user in that forum installed Mint in a guest VM and then attempted to install Oracle's Guest Additons into that guest. He got the same error message we have all gotten when doing this:

[...You appear to have a version of the VBoxGuestAdditions software
on your system which was installed from a different source or using a
different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your
Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly
recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before
installing this version. If this is simply an older or a damaged
installation you may safely proceed.

Do you wish to continue anyway? [yes or no]

If the forum moderator is to believed the correct answer is:

Mint comes with a pre-install version of the guest additions and it is not the ones from VirtualBox. If you try to install over it the guest will not work properly.

There are two ways to remove them, the terminal and the package manager. If you use the package manager you must be sure to remove all the packages (mint has several)

Just to be clear we are talking about removing the virtualbox packages from the Guest not the host. Those should be what I posted above:

virtualbox-guest-dkms
virtualbox-guest-utils
virtualbox-guest-x11

Like I said above I have never removed any of these files in the guest before installing the Guest Additions that came with the VBox applicaion from Oracle and it has always worked without incident. In fact I have 12 Mint guests of varying vintage that have the additions at the 4.2.12 level - all from oracle. But ...

[anothermuggle]

Since there seems to be some confusion over this I thought I'd go to the source: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54881

The user in that forum installed Mint in a guest VM and then attempted to install Oracle's Guest Additons into that guest. He got the same error message we have all gotten when doing this:

[...You appear to have a version of the VBoxGuestAdditions software
on your system which was installed from a different source or using a
different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your
Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly
recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before
installing this version. If this is simply an older or a damaged
installation you may safely proceed.

Do you wish to continue anyway? [yes or no]

If the forum moderator is to believed the correct answer is:

Mint comes with a pre-install version of the guest additions and it is not the ones from VirtualBox. If you try to install over it the guest will not work properly.

There are two ways to remove them, the terminal and the package manager. If you use the package manager you must be sure to remove all the packages (mint has several)

Just to be clear we are talking about removing the virtualbox packages from the Guest not the host. Those should be what I posted above:

virtualbox-guest-dkms
virtualbox-guest-utils
virtualbox-guest-x11

Like I said above I have never removed any of these files in the guest before installing the Guest Additions that came with the VBox applicaion from Oracle and it has always worked without incident. In fact I have 12 Mint guests of varying vintage that have the additions at the 4.2.12 level - all from oracle. But ...

For the record, everything was working fine with whatever was preinstalled but I took the advise from this thread and uninstalled those packages and installed the version through the Devices menu. As far as I can see its made no difference, everything has continued to work perfectly fine.

One question I do have is what do I do when I update VirtualBox on the host? Do I need to do any uninstalling in the guest or just squirt the new installation on top of the old one?

[altair4]

You don't have to uninstall anything to update to the new Guest Additions.

When you update the VBox application you will need to go through the Devices menu on the guest to update the Guest Additions. When you do that VBox itself will show you that it is removing the old and adding the new - it does this by itself.

EDIT: It's interesting that you noticed no difference. It's been my experience that these vitrualbox files that Mint insists on installing in the guest will make some things work - like shared folders but not other things like screen resizing. Screen resizing has never worked for me until I installed the real guest additions.

[anothermuggle]

You don't have to uninstall anything to update to the new Guest Additions.

When you update the VBox application you will need to go through the Devices menu on the guest to update the Guest Additions. When you do that VBox itself will show you that it is removing the old and adding the new - it does this by itself.

EDIT: It's interesting that you noticed no difference. It's been my experience that these vitrualbox files that Mint insists on installing will make some things work - like shared folders but not other things like screen resizing. Screen resizing has never worked for me until I installed the real guest additions.

Mouse integration, window resizing and shared folders were all working before and after. The only thing I changed was the group permissions as mentioned earlier in this thread.