Sun Microsystems 3.0.0 4.3 Linux Guest Additions

4 Guest Additions

Ifyou would like to install the ﬁles and drivers manually,you can extract the ﬁles from

the Windows Guest Additions setup by typing:

VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe /extract

To explicitly extract the Windows Guest Additions for another platform than

the current running one (e.g. 64-bit ﬁles on a 32-bit system), you have to ex-

ecute the appropriate platform installer (VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe or

VBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64.exe) with the /extract parameter.

Earlierversions of VirtualBox provided a virtual AMD PCNet Ethernet card to guests by

default. Since Microsoft no longer ships a driver for that card with Windows (starting

with Windows Vista), if you select Windows Vista or newer as the guest operating

system for a virtual machine, VirtualBox will instead present a virtual Intel network

controller to the guest (see chapter 6.1,Virtualnetworking hardware, page 82).

However,if for any reason you have a 32-bit Windows Vista VM that is conﬁgured

to use an AMD PCNet card, you will have no networking in the guest initially.

As a convenience, VirtualBox ships with a 32-bit driver for the AMD PCNet card,

which comes with the Windows Guest Additions. If you install these in a 32-bit Vista

guest, the driver will automatically be installed as well. If, for some reason, you

would like to install the driver manually,you can extract the required ﬁles from the

Windows Guest Additions setup. Please consult chapter 4.2.4,Manual ﬁle extraction,

page 64 on how to achieve this. You will then ﬁnd the AMD PCNet driver ﬁles in the

x86\Network\AMD\netamd.inf subdirectory of the default install directory.

Alternatively,change the Vista guest’s VM settings to use an Intel networking card

instead of the default AMD PCNet card; see chapter 3.7.7,Network settings, page 52

for details.

Unfortunately,there is no 64-bit driver available for the AMD PCNet card. So for

64-bit Windows VMs, you should always use the Intel networking devices.

4.3 Linux Guest Additions

Like the Windows Guest Additions, the VirtualBox Guest Additions for Linux take the

form of a set of device drivers and system applications which may be installed in the

guest operating system.

The following Linux distributions are ofﬁcially supported:

•FedoraCore 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11;

•RedhatEnterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5;

•SUSE and openSUSE Linux 9, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1;