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using vbox additions with live cds

Posted: 2. Feb 2012, 21:54
by mimosa
The "additions" (if I've got the name right) allow a much more usable fullscreen interface with a responsive mouse. At least on my slow hardware, VirtualBox is almost unusable without.

But if I understand correctly, the Additions have to be presented as an iso to the virtual machine's CD drive.

So is there any way of using them with a live CD (also an iso)? Like, if VBox had two CD drives or something?

Grateful for any suggestions.

For some reason I decided to play with Slitaz this evening ...

Re: using vbox additions with live cds

Posted: 2. Feb 2012, 22:28
by Shador
Just go into the settings of your vm (Modify/Change or something like that). Then select mass storage and press the left button, the one with a plus and a single disk on it, next to *-Controller, whereas * could be anything of IDE, SATA, SCSI, ... This should give you another drive.
Great those VMs. Still missing that button on my physical hardware. An Upgrade button to get the latest, greatest, overperforming developments would be great as well. 8-)

A somewhat more advanced solution would be building a live module containing the guest additions. But especially for kernel modules this is not so straightforward. Do a forum search, there was a guy recently doing this for the nvidia proprietary driver.

Re: using vbox additions with live cds

Posted: 2. Feb 2012, 22:44
by mimosa
Thanks Shador, I'll give that a try. Just spent a fruitless half hour trying to get wireless working with the actual physical Slitaz CD - the great advantage of virtualisation in this case is that what is really a wireless connection on the host is presented to the guest as eth0!