Hello, and welcome to today's video presentation on installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions
into an Oracle Linux 8 virtual machine.
This video will focus on installing the Guest Additions from VirtualBox 6.1, the latest
version at the time of this recording, into an Oracle Linux 8 VM.
So let us get started.
The VirtualBox Guest Additions per design get installed inside a virtual machine after
installing the guest operating system.
They consist of device drivers and system applications that optimize the guest operating
system for better performance and usability.
The Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions provide installers for all supported guest operating
systems on a single CD-ROM image called VBoxGuestAdditions.iso.
The location of this image file is 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 then run the specific installer.
The Guest Additions offer the following features:
Mouse pointer integration
Shared folders
Better video with accelerated 2D and 3D graphics support
VM window resizing in Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris guests
Time synchronization
and Shared clipboard.
Additional details on these features and others are available in the VirtualBox documentation.
This demo uses a pre-installed Oracle Linux 8 physical system with VirtualBox 6.1 and
a VM named ol8-test-vbox.
If using VirtualBox installed on a compute instance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, there
will be differences in the desktop environment navigation steps depending on whether using
Oracle Linux 7 or Oracle Linux 8.
First, open the Virtual Box graphical interface by clicking Activities in the upper left corner
of the screen.
Next, use the search text field to find and open the VirtualBox application by starting
to type its name.
Click the Oracle VM VirtualBox icon.
Once the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager opens, start the ol8-test-vbox VM.
After the VM boots, log into the VM.
From the VM [Running] dialog window menu, select Devices, then Insert Guest Additions
CD image ...
The Gnome Desktop will display a message dialog about the VirtualBox Guest Additions (GA)
media containing software intended to run automatically.
Click Cancel.
Next, click Activities in the upper left corner of the screen.
Then click the Terminal icon from the dock on the left side.
In the terminal, find the GA media by typing the command mount.
The GA media automatically mounted at /run/media/oracle/VBox_GAs_6.1.10.
Change to that directory by typing cd /run/media/oracle/VBox_GAs_6.1.10.
Get a listing of the files by typing ls -l
The previous message dialog displayed when the GA media mounted, would automatically
run the command autorun.sh if accepted.
Before installing the Guest Additions, ensure the following packages exist on your Linux
guest VM to ensure a successful run.
Type sudo dnf install kernel-uek-devel-$(uname -r) gcc binutils automake make perl bzip2
elfutils-libelf-devel.
uname -r will ensure that the matching development packages for the currently active uek kernel
get installed.
If you have recently performed a dnf upgrade without rebooting, reboot the system before
executing this step, so the active kernel is the latest installed.
If prompted for the user's password due to using sudo, enter it.
DNF will resolve any dependencies and prompt for confirmation to continue.
Accept the packages to install by typing y and hitting Enter.
DNF might prompt to accept new GPG keys.
Accept the importing of these keys by typing y and hitting Enter.
The requested packages will install.
Once complete, type sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run to install the Guest Additions.
If prompted again for the user's password due to using sudo, enter it.
The Guest Additions will install and build several kernel modules.
After the install completes, verify the kernel modules exist by typing lsmod | grep -i vbox.
Now, reboot the VM by typing sudo systemctl reboot.
When the VM reboots, all the features offered by the Guest Additions are available.
Enable these features through vboxmanage from the host's command-line or through the Oracle
VM VirtualBox graphical interface.
That completes this demo on installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions in an Oracle Linux
8 virtual machine.
More details are available in the VirtualBox documentation.
Thank you for watching this video and enjoy using VirtualBox on Oracle Linux 8.
Please check our additional information on Oracle Linux 8 in the Oracle Linux 8 Documentation
or Oracle Linux Learning Library.