On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 10:14:45PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
On 22-Feb-09 10:39:25, Ted Harding wrote:
On 22-Feb-09 09:44:11, Chris G wrote:
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 09:30:50AM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
[...] I'm running Debian Etch in VirtualBox on Windows XP. I too agree that VB works very smoothly and effectively (especially since I added that extra 1GB RAM to bring it up to 2GB, since in 1GB with 512MB for the guest, XP regularly got very close to the limit!).
However, I've not noticed provision for file-sharing between the Linux guest and the XP host, and I'd be very interested in that! At present, when I want to transfer files between the two, I use a USB stick. Works fine, of course, but is quite a hassle.
So: Where does one locate the file-sharing facilities? (And I'd like it to work both ways).
Ah, you're running it the opposite way round to what I'm doing, I have a Windows XP guest running on an xubuntu 8.10 host. However as far as I can tell from the documentation it should work for you just as well as it does for me.
OK, first question, do you have the "VirtualBox Guest Additions" installed on your guest system, this is a prerequisite. Then you go to the "Devices" menu and select "Shared Folders...." and specify which folders in the host machine you want to make available to the guest machine. (That's the "Devices" menu in the VirtualBox process running on your host.)
Once you have done that you mount the shared folder as a filesystem in the Linux guest.
It's all fairly well documented in section 4.6 of the manual.
Chris Green
Many thanks, Chris! A fair bit of the above was staring me in the face, once I looked in the right place. I'll follow the guidance and see how I get on!
First step: Find the Guest Additions for Linux ... ! Thanks again. Ted.
Well, thanks a lot, Chris! Got the Additions installed properly, and then connected the designated shared folders. and all seems well!
Excellent, glad to hear it. I certainly find the shared folders in VirtualBox much better than the equivalent in Vmware (though I should hope that Vmware will have improved theirs by now). It means that I can use Linux filesystems from my Windows guest for critical data and back it up very easily in Linux.