Monday, December 03, 2012

Mount a VirtualBox shared folder in Ubuntu guest

VirtualBox "presents" to the Linux operating systems a device named after the shared name you selected from "Devices|Shared Folders" VM menu option. In order to use that as a directory in Ubuntu or any Linux system you need to follow the same steps you would follow to mount any device. Let us say you picked as a name "reports" to mount some reports folder in our host:
  1. Create a directory to be used as the destination of the mounting point:
    sudo mkdir -p /mnt/reports
    
  2. Mount the device using the proper file system type (-t)
    sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`logname`,gid=`logname` report /mnt/reports
    
Look how I mounted after /mnt. That is for the purpose of organization, you should not be mounting in any path (even though it is perfectly valid). You better know from one single place how many mounted paths you have.

Finally look at the use of `logname` invocation to make sure the VBOX folder gets mounted in a directory where the username of the current logged in user has enough permissions.

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