Guest Additions Virtualbox For Mac

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  • 1 First Steps
    • 1.4 Supported Host Operating Systems
    • 1.8 Running Your Virtual Machine
    • 1.10 Snapshots
    • 1.14 Importing and Exporting Virtual Machines
    • 1.15 Integrating with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
    • 1.18 Soft Keyboard
  • 2 Installation Details
    • 2.1 Installing on Windows Hosts
    • 2.2 Installing on Mac OS X Hosts
    • 2.3 Installing on Linux Hosts
    • 2.4 Installing on Oracle Solaris Hosts
  • 3 Configuring Virtual Machines
    • 3.1 Supported Guest Operating Systems
    • 3.2 Unattended Guest Installation
    • 3.4 General Settings
    • 3.5 System Settings
    • 3.6 Display Settings
    • 3.11 USB Support
    • 3.14 Alternative Firmware (EFI)
  • 4 Guest Additions
    • 4.2 Installing and Maintaining Guest Additions
    • 4.3 Shared Folders
    • 4.4 Drag and Drop
    • 4.5 Hardware-Accelerated Graphics
    • 4.7 Guest Properties
    • 4.8 Guest Control File Manager
    • 4.10 Memory Overcommitment
    • 4.11 Controlling Virtual Monitor Topology
  • 5 Virtual Storage
    • 5.11 vboximg-mount: A Utility for FUSE Mounting a Virtual Disk Image
  • 6 Virtual Networking
    • 6.3 Network Address Translation (NAT)
  • 7 VBoxManage
    • 7.8 VBoxManage modifyvm
    • 7.10 VBoxManage import
    • 7.11 VBoxManage export
    • 7.37 VBoxManage unattended
    • 7.38 VBoxManage snapshot
    • 7.39 VBoxManage clonevm
    • 7.40 VBoxManage sharedfolder
    • 7.41 VBoxManage extpack
    • 7.42 VBoxManage dhcpserver
    • 7.43 VBoxManage debugvm
    • 7.44 VBoxManage cloudprofile
    • 7.45 VBoxManage cloud
    • 7.46 VBoxManage signova
    • 7.47 VBoxManage updatecheck
    • 7.48 vboximg-mount
  • From Virtualbox Manual: Chapter 14: 14.2. Known Issues Mac OS X guests: VirtualBox does not provide Guest Additions for Mac OS X at this time snip From the content of this, I wouldn't hold out for such support in VirtualBox any time soon. The situation really has not changed since then.
  • Now reinstall the VirtualBox Guest Tool once more to make it work. Do it like you did before. Choose VirtualBox Guest Tool. When the installation is finished, click on Restart. Check Graphics Display. When the Mac is up, click on the Apple logo icon and select About This Mac. Then the Graphics should be Display 128.

Guest Additions are available for MacOS starting with VirtualBox 6.0. Installing: Boot & login into your guest macOS. In VirtualBox UI, use menu Devices Insert Guest Additions CD image.; CD will appear on your macOS desktop, open it.

Guest Additions Virtualbox Mac Os X Download

In order to access certain aspects of a virtual machine in VirtualBox, you will need to install Guest Additions (similar to VMWare Tools I guess)

Buy a static ip address. There is a manual page for installing Guest Additions but not all of it is self-explanatory…

First you need to log into your Linux virtual machine (VM) and install/configure x, y and z.

Install DKMS

This part is relatively straightforward, just install using whatever package manager your Linux distribution has. The below example uses APT that comes with Debian-based distros:

Where to find VBoxGuestAdditions.iso

Usefully Oracle don’t tell you in their guide, but it is available with the rest of the downloads at http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/

So for example for version 4.1.6 the VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.6.iso is located at http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.6/VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.6.iso

You need this image to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions themselves onto your VM, so you can either download it to your Linux VM and mount it there, or (which is what I did) download it to your Mac OS X host and mount it in the DVD drive using the VirtualBox Manager.

How to mount the image

You need to mount the image on the Linux VM, so that you can install VirtualBox Guest Additions from it. If you have mounted it in the VirtualBox Manager in the DVD drive then you will still need to mount it in the Linux VM; Since I can’t remember the last time I had to mount something in *nix from the command-line, here’s a quick way.

Then you should see VBoxLinuxAdditions in that directory, which you need to run as per the manual. If the above doesn’t work it might be because your DVD drive in VirtualBox is called something else, like dvd (instead of dvd1) which probably differs depending on which distro you’re using.

Then you need to run the installer.

Once that’s done you can restart.

Everything should be finished now installation/configuration-wise, but you might encounter some problems… (otherwise skip to Mount the host folder)

Kernel header problems

I got some missing kernel header problems when trying to install Guest Additions, which if building the main Guest Additions module fails will be logged.

Additions

If you see something like this…

So you can do just that!

Hopefully this should install now (although the XFree86 bit will fail, assuming you’re using the command-line) and you may need to restart the VM, although I’m not sure.

Virtualbox Macos Catalina Guest Additions

Mount the host folder

You can create the host folder in the VirtualBox Manager in the Shared Folders tab on the Settings for that VM. If you add it on the command-line it’ll appear under the machine folders anyways. If you want to type it though, here’s what you’d type into the Mac OS X terminal (note this is the only thing that you’d type into the host itself)

To mount the Shared Folder from within the guest, the instructions from Ubuntu (as my guest is Ubuntu, although I think this is a better way to mount it anyways) were very useful.

Virtualbox Guest Additions For Macos

Just change the target to be wherever you want the Shared Folder to be mounted in the guest. Now in theory if you go to that path in the guest, it should be the same as the directory you shared from the host!