Installation in VirtualBox VM still problematic

Q&A
21

I just noticed your comment… Folder sharing is known not to work :frowning:, but shared clipboard and drag/drop should work.

22

I was pretty much down all weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to do any work on this, but it’s good to know that the folder sharing is a known issue.

This is kind of important for me, for moving things like large data files back and forth, and for keeping software installers in one location so I don’t need to re-download them into each VM.

I’ll be doing some more testing, probably tonight.

23

Docs update: Installing Clear Linux OS as VM in VirtualBox is now tracked here: https://github.com/clearlinux/clear-linux-documentation/pull/502

Following PR and associated GH Issues were closed per:

1 Like
24

I did some additional digging.

VBoxClient --vmsvga

This un-intuitively enables dynamic window resizing, so you can change your desktop size in gnome control center. It doesn’t seem to depend on which graphics controller you choose.

I have successfully used shared folders. Here are the important things I had to change; otherwise it silently just doesn’t work:

Make Permanent
Auto-mount

  • Create the mount point manually in the VM
  • Mount manually (can use /etc/fstab or systemd.boot for persistence), e.g. sudo mount -t vboxsf VBoxShared /mnt/shared
  • Use the Folder Name from the VirtualBox dialog for the device argument to mount above.

I found this docker issue helpful.

25

Going forward for VirtualBox, please reference:
https://clearlinux.org/documentation/clear-linux/get-started/virtual-machine-install/virtualbox-cl-installer

This document will be removed: https://clearlinux.org/documentation/clear-linux/get-started/virtual-machine-install/virtualbox