Guest Additions are designed to be installed inside a virtual machine after the guest operating system has been installed. They comprise device drivers and system applications that optimize the guest operating system for better performance and usability.
The Virtual box Guest Additions are helpful in the following situations:
- When you want to share the clipboard of the guest operating system with the host operating system.
- When you look for better video performance, this provides the best time synchronization.
- For a secured host/guest communication channels
- If you are looking for a simple way, to share folders between the host and the guest.
- It has provided a drag-and-drop feature that allows copying or opening files from the host to the guest or from the guest to the host.
- If you are looking for easy mouse pointer integration.
For installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on Ubuntu 20.04 we have to do the following two things:
Install Prerequisites:
For installing the VirtualBox guest additions you need to open the terminal. At the start option search for the terminal, once the terminal result comes you just need to click on the terminal option. Once your terminal opens you just need to type the command below and press enter, it will ask for your Ubuntu password enter your Ubuntu password, then press Y (yes). This is to install some essential packages before you install VirtualBox guest additions on your Ubuntu to the operating system.
sudo apt install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
After some time, you see all the installation steps are finished. Once it's done, you can close your terminal.
Install Guest Additions:
The second step is to install guest additions for this you will need to mount the Guest Additions CD. We can do this from within VirtualBox.
Go Devices -> Install Guest Additions CD image as shown in the screenshot. This helps to mount the Guest Additions ISO file inside your virtual machine.
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Now will get a dialog window, prompting you to run the installer to launch it.
If you have done this step previously and it is already mounted, you need to find out the location where it is mounted. For this you need to use the following commands:
ls /media/$USER/VBox*
ls /media/cdrom*/VBox*
Once you've found it, you can run it using the below command
sudo /media/$USER/VBox*/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
After a reboot, your VirtualBox Manager should now have Guest Additions installed! then you just need to provide your open tools password, then click on authenticate
It will open a terminal window as shown in the below figure from which the actual installation of VirtualBox Guest Additions will happen. Once the installation completes, press Enter to close the installer terminal window. Then power off your Ubuntu guest OS to change some settings from the VirtualBox manager.
To enable Shared Clipboard and Drag’n’Drop functionality between Guest and Host Machine. Go to General => Advanced and enable the two options (Shared Clipboard and Drag’n’Drop) based on your preference. Then click OK to save the settings and boot your system, log in, and test if everything is working fine.
Here it is!! it installs successfully your Virtual box Guest Additions and works properly now.
Conclusion:
The VirtualBox Guest Additions forms the basic tool of Ubuntu that makes the complex jobs to run easily. The article gives you a brief idea For installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on Ubuntu 20.04 in a very simplified manner.
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