I got everything working from with in virtual box, except for the additions. I was able to run VBoxLinuxAdditions.run (from the Guest additions iso) and it ran to completion without producing any errors. It compiled some modules and modified my xorg.conf file. But there were several problems with the additions.
First the script changed the video device driver from vesa to vboxvideo which gets me a maximum resolution of 1024x768. All other higher resolutions complained about "vrefresh out of range" or "hsync out of range". I do not understand how that can be given that I gave a wide range of hsync and vrefresh for my monitor. Finding little help from /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I decided to go back to my old vesa driver which at least gives be a slightly higher resolution of 1152x864. I was wishing the vbox driver could give me 1440x900 but that did not happen. Setting modelines also did not help so I gave up pretty quickly.
My next issue is that I am not able to mount my shared folder. I created a shared folder in VirtualBox > Settings. Which I should be able to mount from the guest OS using "mount -t vboxsf ". But when I try that I am getting "/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device". I figured that the module for the vboxsf did not load properly. So I did a lsmod and indeed there is no vboxvfs. Trying to do "modprobe vboxvfs" yeilded "FATAL: Error inserting vboxcvfs: Protocol error". What ever that means. There were no messages in dmesg. I did not bother to find out what caused the problem. Don't want to waste too much time since I may not even be needing any sharing if I can just ssh to all the machines.
There was another problem however. I cannot ssh from my master OS to the guest OS. After googling for a few minutes I found out that I need to set up port forwarding rules. Not sure how to do it from virtualbox. Another option is to use "Host attached" for the network instead of "NAT", but alas, I only have NAT option available in my VirtualBox beta3 for mac. Not sure how I can enable bridge networking. So I skipped that as well.
The good news is that I don't need all the above things. They were just good to have options that I could have used.
First the script changed the video device driver from vesa to vboxvideo which gets me a maximum resolution of 1024x768. All other higher resolutions complained about "vrefresh out of range" or "hsync out of range". I do not understand how that can be given that I gave a wide range of hsync and vrefresh for my monitor. Finding little help from /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I decided to go back to my old vesa driver which at least gives be a slightly higher resolution of 1152x864. I was wishing the vbox driver could give me 1440x900 but that did not happen. Setting modelines also did not help so I gave up pretty quickly.
My next issue is that I am not able to mount my shared folder. I created a shared folder in VirtualBox > Settings. Which I should be able to mount from the guest OS using "mount -t vboxsf
There was another problem however. I cannot ssh from my master OS to the guest OS. After googling for a few minutes I found out that I need to set up port forwarding rules. Not sure how to do it from virtualbox. Another option is to use "Host attached" for the network instead of "NAT", but alas, I only have NAT option available in my VirtualBox beta3 for mac. Not sure how I can enable bridge networking. So I skipped that as well.
The good news is that I don't need all the above things. They were just good to have options that I could have used.
Comments
Open the linux guest OS
Go to menu-> Devices -> Install Guest Additions.
This mounts a cd image named VBOXADDITIONS...something_else.
Inside the cd image there is a script called VBoxLinuxAdditions.run, run this script, reboot the virtual machine and then give the mount command (eg. mount -t vboxsf shared /media/shared).
This worked for me and probably works for everyone!
You may also need to change a little the command in order to view inside the folder as a normal user and not only as root.