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)

Push-button installer of macOS on VirtualBox. Macos-guest-virtualbox.sh is a Bash script that creates a macOS virtual machine guest on VirtualBox with unmodified macOS installation files downloaded directly from Apple servers. A default install only requires the user to sit patiently and, less than ten times, press enter when prompted by the script, without interacting with the virtual machine. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Table of Contents

4.1. Introduction to Guest Additions

4.2. Installing and Maintaining Guest Additions

4.2.1. Guest Additions for Windows
4.2.2. Guest Additions for Linux
4.2.3. Guest Additions for Oracle Solaris
4.2.4. Guest Additions for OS/2

4.3. Shared Folders

4.3.1. Manual Mounting
4.3.2. Automatic Mounting

4.4. Drag and Drop

4.4.1. Supported Formats
4.4.2. Known Limitations

4.5. Hardware-Accelerated Graphics

4.5.1. Hardware 3D Acceleration (OpenGL and Direct3D 8/9)
4.5.2. Hardware 2D Video Acceleration for Windows Guests

4.6. Seamless Windows

4.7. Guest Properties

4.7.1. Using Guest Properties to Wait on VM Events

4.8. Guest Control File Manager

4.8.1. Using the Guest Control File Manager

4.9. Guest Control of Applications

4.10. Memory Overcommitment

4.10.1. Memory Ballooning
4.10.2. Page Fusion

The previous chapter covered getting started with Oracle VM VirtualBox and installing operating systems in a virtual machine. For any serious and interactive use, the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions will make your life much easier by providing closer integration between host and guest and improving the interactive performance of guest systems. This chapter describes the Guest Additions in detail.

As mentioned in Section 1.2, “Some Terminology”, the Guest Additions are designed to be installed inside a virtual machine after the guest operating system has been installed. They consist of device drivers and system applications that optimize the guest operating system for better performance and usability. See Section 3.1, “Supported Guest Operating Systems” for details on what guest operating systems are fully supported with Guest Additions by Oracle VM VirtualBox.

The Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions for all supported guest operating systems are provided as a single CD-ROM image file which is called VBoxGuestAdditions.iso. This image file is located in the installation directory of Oracle VM VirtualBox. To install the Guest Additions for a particular VM, you mount this ISO file in your VM as a virtual CD-ROM and install from there.

The Guest Additions offer the following features:

Mouse pointer integration. To overcome the limitations for mouse support described in Section 1.8.2, “Capturing and Releasing Keyboard and Mouse”, this feature provides you with seamless mouse support. You will only have one mouse pointer and pressing the Host key is no longer required to free the mouse from being captured by the guest OS. To make this work, a special mouse driver is installed in the guest that communicates with the physical mouse driver on your host and moves the guest mouse pointer accordingly.
Shared folders. These provide an easy way to exchange files between the host and the guest. Much like ordinary Windows network shares, you can tell Oracle VM VirtualBox to treat a certain host directory as a shared folder, and Oracle VM VirtualBox will make it available to the guest operating system as a network share, irrespective of whether the guest actually has a network. See Section 4.3, “Shared Folders”.
Better video support. While the virtual graphics card which Oracle VM VirtualBox emulates for any guest operating system provides all the basic features, the custom video drivers that are installed with the Guest Additions provide you with extra high and non-standard video modes, as well as accelerated video performance.
In addition, with Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris guests, you can resize the virtual machine's window if the Guest Additions are installed. The video resolution in the guest will be automatically adjusted, as if you had manually entered an arbitrary resolution in the guest's Display settings. See Section 1.8.5, “Resizing the Machine's Window”.
If the Guest Additions are installed, 3D graphics and 2D video for guest applications can be accelerated. See Section 4.5, “Hardware-Accelerated Graphics”.
Seamless windows. With this feature, the individual windows that are displayed on the desktop of the virtual machine can be mapped on the host's desktop, as if the underlying application was actually running o

Guest Additions Virtualbox For Mac