Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions in Linux Mint Debian

I am tired of the more and more resource hungry nature of Ubuntu’s latest versions. I have tried other Linux distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE but I have a soft corner for debian based distros. So tonight, I have installed Linux Mint Debian in a virtualbox VM. Linux Mint Debian, as the name suggests, is a linux distro based on the popular Debian Linux. They just added some extra tools and toys to make the plain old Debian look and feel “wow!”.

If you have ever used VirtualBox, then you’re probably aware of the “Guest Additions” which makes the VBox guests more accessible and more usable. After the additions are installed, mouse capturing, copy-pasting between host and guest, better hardware and video support, full screen and seamless modes etc features are available.

On Ubuntu, installing the Guest Additions in a guest machine is pretty straightforward. You mount the Guest Additions cd image and accept the auto run prompt. The rest is done automatically. But in case of Debian, things are a bit geekier. You need to have the kernel modules and source codes so that the guest additions can be compiled and loaded into the kernel of your system. So, before we try to run the guest additions installer, we need to run these following commands to prepare our system:

Running these commands shall update your package list, download and install the required packages for compilation and then prepare the environment for the actual operation.

Now navigate terminal to the VirtualBox Guest Additions directory and use the following command to run it:

After the installation is over, shut down the VM, allocate enough video memory (at least 32MB, I did 128MB) and enable 3D Acceleration from the Settings > Display tab of the VM.

Start the virtual machine and enjoy! 🙂