If you use some other distributions as a guest, look at the instructions for Debian. So, I will show you the settings for Arch Linux, Linux Mint and Debian as guest systems. In this tutorial, my host system is Arch Linux, but the host system does not matter in this case because we will do all the setting in the guest systems. Change the user permission for the shared folder.Install guest additions for your guest system.There are several essential steps you need to follow, to enable a shared folder between the real machine (host) and the virtual machine (guest):

I will also show a universal way that should work for any Linux guest distribution. So, I will show you how to enable a shared folder in Virtualbox for Debian, Linux Mint/Ubuntu, and Arch Linux as guest systems.

However, configuring the Virtualbox to share files between your main system and the system you installed in a VirtualBox is not trivial. Instructionsįirst, find out your numerical uid and gid by performing the following shell commands.VirtualBox is a very useful tool to install operating systems inside the main system. However, it is important that the shared folder must exist on the Host OS or else the Guest OS will fail to boot.

Shared folders are guaranteed to be mounted at boot time.

Mounting shared folders to specific paths other than /media/sf_(share name).

Instead of relying on Guest Additions, if you have sudo permissions, shared folders can be mounted at boot-time using fstab. Applications that require paths at boot will not be able to access the shared folder even after it is mounted - such as Docker.

Mounting does not happen at boot-time.

Shared folders will always mount in /media/sf_(share name) unless specified using through vbox drivers in the guest OS.

While using VirtualBox's Guest Additions to mount shared folders provides a seamless way to mount shared folders, there are also disadvantages. How to mount a VirtualBox shared folder when the Guest OS boots Problem

Ubuntu virtualbox shared folder