Today I did something completely odd and built a virtual machine on a windows box to hold a Ubuntu VM. Usually I’m building on a Linux host to hold windows or another linux box.
Anyway – it’s pretty straightforward and easy to do. I used Ubuntu and I went with the 14.04 Desktop Install that you can get here. I grabbed virtual box from here. The box was built and a load of GIS software was installed for testing purposes. The question ended up being “How to I share a directory in Windows with Ubuntu?”. I’ve done it with samba – but not quite like this.
So to share a folder between a Ubuntu VM and windows host here is what I did (thanks to Google and here)
1. Install the Virtual Box Additions under Devices -> Insert Quest Additions CD Image
2. Start your VM. In Virtual Box go to Devices -> Shared Folder Settings. I added a Folder called C:\Users\rjhale and I made it permanent and I wanted it remounted after a reboot.
3. The trick is now to open a terminal in your VM (my case Ubuntu) and create a folder. I made mine under the media directory.
4. Issue the next command to mount the VirtualBox Shared folder under Ubuntu at /media/windows-share
And you’re sharing a folder with windows. Move your files back and forth with ease until you reboot and you’ll need to issue the command in 4 again. Of course you don’t have to make a directory under /media – I almost used /mount. If you want you can script the mount command to automatically do this upon boot.
Go forth and build a virtual machine. I’m 99% sure these commands aren’t Ubuntu centric if that distro is not your favorite. BUT I DIDN’T TEST IT.
