In turn Qemu has two different scopes for virtual machines: system and session. A bit of explanation, under the hood Gnome Boxes uses libvirtd, a library that abstracts virtualization implementations, to interact with Qemu. With the packages installed, I tried Boxes and found I could not do anything because it would fail as libvirtd was not starting automatically as it should. I would also recommend installing virt-manager and virtviewer in case you need to perform more advanced tasks then Boxes will allow. After that, I installed the gnome-boxes package which automatically drags in Qemu. While not strictly necessary, the first step for me was to uninstall VirtualBox and all it’s dependent packages such as guest additions and the host packages. Note that I’m using Arch and Gnome 3.12 at the time this was written. What follows is a summary of my experience getting things running optimally, hopefully it will be helpful to others interested in trying the switch. This process was a kind of lucky trial and error.Ĭan you tell me which is the best practice to accomplish this? That is installing the VirtualBox guest additions in a volatile environment (the Arch ISO).I recently decided to try switching to Gnome Boxes for my Windows Virtual Machine from Virtual Box simply to see if the integration with Gnome Shell would be better. I reboot an try to install the guest additions without updating, using the last Arch ISO available: pacman -Sy virtualbox-guest-utils # now no -uīut I know that this is a bad practice! Anyway I run: depmod 3.16.1-1-ARCH # non-updated kernel! Reading around it is suggested to reboot, but in my case I will lose everything since I am running from an ISO. I assume that this is due to the mismatch between the uname -r and the updated kernel.

has updated the kernel and therefore I have now a 3.16.2-1-ARCH directory. The version is that from uname -r and I get an error again, as there is no directory: /lib/modules/3.16.1-1-ARCH I know that I can fix it creating the dependency file: depmod 3.16.1-1-ARCH The reason is that in the shared folder I have the scripts to make my persistent setup.Īfter the Arch ISO bootstrap, I run: pacman -Syu virtualbox-guest-utilsĮverything seems smooth but when I load VirtualBox modules: modprobe -a vboxguest vboxsf vboxvideo #Following guide here: vboxsf only might do I am trying to use the shared folders feature when running the Arch ISO as a VirtualBox guest OS.

Virtualbox arch guest shared folders