VirtualBox additions in Mandriva 2010 Linux
Just installed Mandriva 2010 - the Free edition on a 4.3Gb DVD - and as usual, it was installed into a virtual machine. After all, you can't install every Linux ditro that's released on your every-day work computer. VirtualBox was used and it was a surprise to see that the VirtualBox additions were installed by default. Just install the distro and it works straight away. You can move the mouse between Mandriva in the VirtualBox window and the ordinary desktop, copy text on the clipboard from one to the other, and you can even mount a shared folder on the host operating system in the usual way. Brilliant!
There are several versions of Mandriva 2010 and it's not known whether VirtualBox additions come with all of them. You might therefore need to manually install VirtualBox additions if your version doesn't have it. If a new version of VirtualBox comes out with new and better additions, you might want to manually install these too. So how do you go about it?
The instructions in the VirtualBox help file are fine for Ubuntu, but they don't work with every Linux distro and they don't work with Mandriva. Open a Terminal window and enter:
su
gurpmi gcc-c++ kernel-`uname -r| awk -F- '{print $2}'`-latest kernel-`uname -r| awk -F- '{print $2}'`-devel-latest
This installs the stuff you need in order to compile and install the additions. (It was in a Mandriva forum with a typo, which has been corrected.) Now you can click Devices, Install Guest Additions in VirtualBox and install the additions:
cd /media/cdrom
sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
That's it. The additions are installed. To mount a shared folder you open a Terminal window enter su and then mount -t vboxsf xxxx /home/YourName/yyyy where xxxx is the name you gave when you created the shared folder in VirtualBox settings, and yyyy is a folder (you create a folder and then mount it as a shared one so when you open it you see the contents of the host OS shared folder.)
