Everytime I setup a Linux vm in Virtualbox and attempt to get shared folders working, I always run into issues. I decided to create a blog post to save my self the trouble of Googling so that I have the information in one place. In the various distros I have encountered issues with, Manjaro being the most recent, the issues have seemed to have been addressed by three things.
Groups
In all cases it has been important that the user who will be using the
shared directory be a part of the vboxsf group. This is achieved
with:
sudo usermod -a UserToAddGroupTo -G vboxsfI have also found that it is essential to reboot after this change.
Mounting
I also seem to encounter issues with auto-mounting on various distros. To mount a virtualbox shared folder the following seems to work:
mkdir /home/username/mountpoint-name
sudo mount.vboxsf -t vboxsf -o gid=1000,uid=1000,rw SharedFolderNameInHost /home/username/mountpoint-nameThis takes care of mounting for a single session but does not address auto-mounting.
Auto-Mounting
Auto-mounting has worked well in Debian based distros like Kali Linux and Ubuntu but Arch Linux and Manjaro have given me issues. The way I have addressed this in the past has been to create an fstab entry. This seems unfortunately necessary but has seemed to address the auto-mount problem.
Conclusion
Virtualbox shared folders have different levels of annoyance depending on the distro in use. If any readers have any tips they would like to add, please leave me a comment and I will update my post.
