Oracle Virtual Box
Contents
Oracle Virtual Box¶
Notes for OSX.
Using Oracle VirtualBox, installed using brew with extensions:
brew cask install virtualbox virtualbox-extension-pack
Table of Contents¶
Host reconnaissance¶
Discover the chip instructions set with
uname -a
to distinguish between amd, arm, and 32 and 64 bit operating systems.
Linux guest images¶
In general, setting up a Linux VM is relatively configuration-free – following the regular method for creating a new image, unless a fairly unknown distribution of Linux is being used, VirtualBox already configures most of the settings for you.
There is however a slight exception at time of writing (23 September 2020), and that is that with OSX hosts, the new Audio Driver causes the machine to crash (my investigation of this is about a week old and I have lost the logs and research since – this will be updated when I inevitably recreate the problem in the future).
The problem is as follows
after installation is complete, during reboot the image will crash showing status aborted
subsequent boot attempts recreate the above
The prescription is simple:
in Settings/Audio, uncheck Enable Audio, or
use a different audio driver on the Host
Guest Extensions¶
Following a guide from Linuxsize.
Update the guest machine repositories You can do this with a simple
sudo apt update
Fetch dependencies
sudo apt install build-essentials dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Insert the ‘Guest Additions CD Image’, and mount with
sudo mkdir /mnt && sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
Install the Guest Additions
cd /mnt && sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run --nox11
The --nox11 tells the installer not to open an X11 window.
Reboot and validate
sudo reboot
and check the installation with
lsmod | grep vboxguest
The output should list the vboxguest extension if all went to plan.