On the VM Settings page, click the Shared Folders section. If you have more than one virtual machine created select the VM that you wish to set up the shared folder and then click the Settings gear. This document assumes VirtualBox is already installed on the host and a guest VM with Linux has been created with the Guest Additions installed. This document will detail how to share a folder residing on the host machine with the guest.

You can find out more about VirtualBox and download the software from The computer that you install VirtualBox on is commonly called the host machine and the virtual machine is called the guest machine. Using VirtualBox you can install many x86 32bit and 64bit operation systems in a virtual machine. It is a universal way to enable a shared folder and it should work for all distributions.VirtualBox is an Open Source x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product. If you use some other distributions as a guest, look at the instructions for Debian. So, I will show you the settings for Arch Linux, Linux Mint and Debian as guest systems.

In this tutorial, my host system is Arch Linux, but the host system does not matter in this case because we will do all the setting in the guest systems. Change the user permission for the shared folder.Install guest additions for your guest system.There are several essential steps you need to follow, to enable a shared folder between the real machine (host) and the virtual machine (guest): I will also show a universal way that should work for any Linux guest distribution. So, I will show you how to enable a shared folder in Virtualbox for Debian, Linux Mint/Ubuntu, and Arch Linux as guest systems. However, configuring the Virtualbox to share files between your main system and the system you installed in a VirtualBox is not trivial.

VirtualBox is a very useful tool to install operating systems inside the main system.

Virtualbox linux mount shared folder