4 Guest Additions 4.2.4 Guest Additions for OS/2 VirtualBox also ships with a set of drivers that improve running OS/2 in a virtual machine. Due to restrictions of OS/2 itself, this variant of the Guest Additions has a limited feature set see chapter 14, Known limitations, page 181 for details. The OS/2 Guest Additions are provided on the same ISO CD-ROM as those for the other platforms. As a result, mount the ISO in OS/2 as described previously. The OS/2 Guest Additions are located in the directory \32bit\OS2. As we do not provide an automatic installer at this time, please refer to the readme.txt file in that directory, which describes how to install the OS/2 Guest Additions manually. 4.3 Shared folders With the “shared folders” feature of VirtualBox, you can access files of your host system from within the guest system. This is similar how you would use network shares in Windows networks – except that shared folders do not need require networking, only the Guest Additions. Shared Folders are supported with Windows (2000 or newer), Linux and Solaris guests. Shared folders must physically reside on the host and are then shared with the guest, which uses a special file system driver in the Guest Addition to talk to the host. For Windows guests, shared folders are implemented as a pseudo-network redirector for Linux and Solaris guests, the Guest Additions provide a virtual file system. To share a host folder with a virtual machine in VirtualBox, you must specify the path of that folder and choose for it a “share name” that the guest can use to access it. Hence, first create the shared folder on the host then, within the guest, connect to it. There are several ways in which shared folders can be set up for a particular virtual machine: • In the window of a running VM, you can select “Shared folders” from the “Devices” menu, or click on the folder icon on the status bar in the bottom right corner. • If a VM is not currently running, you can configure shared folders in each virtual machine’s “Settings” dialog. • From the command line, you can create shared folders using VBoxManage, as follows: VBoxManage sharedfolder add "VM name" --name "sharename" --hostpath "C:\test" See chapter 8.27, VBoxManage sharedfolder add/remove, page 126 for details. There are two types of shares: 1. VM shares which are only available to the VM for which they have been defined 2. transient VM shares, which can be added and removed at runtime and do not persist after a VM has stopped for these, add the --transient option to the above command line. Shared folders have read/write access to the files at the host path by default. To restrict the guest to have read-only access, create a read-only shared folder. This can either be achieved using the GUI or by appending the parameter --readonly when creating the shared folder with VBoxManage. Starting with version 4.0, VirtualBox shared folders also support symbolic links (symlinks), under the following conditions: 1. The host operating system must support symlinks (i.e. a Mac, Linux or Solaris host is required). 2. Currently only Linux Guest Additions support symlinks. 62