Ubuntu 9.10 came out just a few days ago. I was eager to try it but at the moment, I don’t have a spare computer. However, since my current computer has enough horse power to spare, I thought I’d throw Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine, specifically, VirtualBox.
Installation was a breeze. Installing the Guest Additions to make the resolution changeable and have seemless mouse-movement between Windows and Ubuntu didn’t quite work. I tried to run the VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run by double clicking on it and selecting run from the subsequent dialog but it return this error:
ryan@ryan-desktop:/cdrom$ ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 3.0.8 Guest Additions for Linux installation……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
VirtualBox 3.0.8 Guest Additions installation
This program must be run with administrator privileges. Aborting
So I figured that I’d have to use the command line to do this. So here’s what I did.
- Went to Applications, Accessories and finally to Terminal to open the command line up.
- Executed
cd / - Executed
cd cdrom - Executed
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
That final step, with the sudo is the key step. It may prompt you to enter your password because you need special administrative permissions.
Once you run that, it should work, it’ll install and then say you have to restart.
Enjoy!
Awesome. I’m not a Linux fan, so I’m not too familiar with how to manipulate things through command line. I knew the Guest Additions should work; I’ve used them on other Linux version. Thanks for showing me how to do that. Now to become more familiar with Ubuntu. Appears to actually be a pretty nice OS.
I wish you the best of luck!
Just a word to say that installing Guest Additions in Ubuntu 9.10 did not work for me with VirtualBox version 2. Your post makes me hope that it’s just a VBox version issue; I’m downloading version 3 right now.
Thanks for your indirect help :-)
Great!! It really works. I have Windows 7 as host and Ubuntu Studio 9.10 as guest. Thanks for the solution Ryan!
thanx !!!
Worked for me. Thanks for posting this. I never would have figured this out. One question though: Why does it work this way?
I tried
> sudu su
> VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
Error.
Then
> sudu VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
Error.
Why do you need the ./ before the file name?
Bryan, I’m not 100% sure, but maybe the sodu command requires a full path.
Bryan,
You have a syntax error: the command is not sudu, but sudo.
The ./ before the filename enforces the file location, meaning that the file is in the current dir (specified by the dot . ).
Additionaly, the sudo command runs the next command as a super user. If you run sudo su, you actually become the superuser (has the same effect as logging in the machine as root). If you run sudo VBoxLinux……run means that you are running the VBoxLinux….run as the superuser.
Hope this helps.
Regards.
It worked for me, but for the server part I first had to install the build-essential then things worked out. It failed on installing the windows (how ironic) drivers. Claimed it could not find a X11 or XFree86 Window System, which is correct. I work from comment line on this (virtual) testing server!
But thanx. Showed me (again) how easy it is to manipulate things in Ubuntu/Debian from the command line!
I’m running VBox 3.1, and when I tried to run it from /cdrom I didn’t have any luck. I did have to cd to /media/cdrom/vbox… to get into the CD and then the command you posted worked great!