If you’re running Ubuntu 22.04 inside a VirtualBox virtual machine, installing the Guest Additions software will help you get the most out of the system. VirtualBox Guest Additions will give the machine more capabilities, such as a shared clipboard with the host system, drag and drop file transfer, time synchronization, shared folders, automatic window resizing, and more.
This makes copying data to and from a host system much more convenient. It also changes the virutal machine’s resolution automatically when its window is resized, so you do not need to change it manually. Guest Additions will work with just about any Linux distribution, but instrutions can differ because of dependencies and package managers.
In this turorial, we’ll be going over the step by step instructions to get VirtualBox Guest Additions installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. With these instructions, it doesn’t matter what host system you’re using, as long as the virtual machine is running Ubuntu 22.04. This tutorial assumes that you’ve already installed your Ubuntu 22.04 operating system in the VM correctly.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install Virtualbox guest additions
- How to check Virtualbox guest additions installation
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish |
| Software | Oracle VirtualBox Guest Additions |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Installing Virtualbox guest additions on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish step by step instructions
- The easiest way to install Virtualbox guest additions on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish is to open a open a command line terminal and install the following packages from the standard Ubuntu repository:
$ sudo add-apt-repository multiverse $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11
- All done. Reboot your virtual machine for the changes to take effect:
$ sudo reboot
- Once booted back up, you can confirm that Virtualbox guest additions is running on your system with this
lsmodcommand:$ lsmod | grep vbox vboxvideo 36864 0 drm_ttm_helper 16384 1 vboxvideo vboxsf 77824 0 vboxguest 401408 7 vboxsf ttm 86016 3 vmwgfx,vboxvideo,drm_ttm_helper drm_kms_helper 307200 2 vmwgfx,vboxvideo drm 606208 8 vmwgfx,drm_kms_helper,vboxvideo,drm_ttm_helper,ttm
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to install VirtualBox Guest Additions on an Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux virtual machine. VirtualBox’s Guest Additions software makes virtual machines much easier to use. You can now take advantage of the guest additions features after you enable it from inside the VirtualBox menus.