Virtualbox can do a lot more if you get the ‘guest additions’ stuff working. You can read up on other people’s blogs about that more. For now, I just wanted to walk through a bullet point summary of how to get it working on a Windows machine running as a VM inside an Ubuntu Virtualbox host. Probably this method will work for whatever version of windows you are doing, but I haven’t tried others:
- Turn on the guest (windows) VM and make sure it’s running
- In the Host, go to the ‘devices’ menu and to “install guest additions”
- Since it’s just really hard to find the file manager for me (I never use windows) in a menu somewhere go to photos or anything that looks like it might ‘explore’ to try to open the file manager in Windows
- Explore the File Manager to find the CD rom and see it sitting there. Double click it
- Assuming you are on a 64bit machine double click ‘VBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64’ entry inside the ROM. If you have a difference piece of hardware, adjust accordingly and click that.
- Select ‘yes’ to the first option it fires at you if you’d like to run it and make changes to your system
- Do some ‘next, next’ stuff
- When prompted with a question like: ‘Would you like to install this device softwre?” Select “Install”
- If prompted to ‘Reboot now’, reboot. If not, probably you should reboot anyways!
I hope some or all of this helps one or more of you, although I truly hope you don’t have to use windows other than when you’re in a jam. This OS is just painful…
