Re-sizing a Virtualbox Debian Guest Window

4 Oct 2015

v 0.21

Ok .. it has been nearly a year .. I guess that means I have a whole swag of material to write about.


It has been driving me nuts.

No matter what I've done, I have not been able to dynamically re-size Debian Jessie in a virtualbox window.  Until yesterday.  Now, whilst I'm describing how to do this in Debian Jessie, the broad principles apply to other guests, such as PC-BSD.

So, here we go.

• When you install Jessie, select all the video memory you can - a 128mb video card and make sure you have NO 3d acceleration.
• Once you have done the installation, add contrib to the sources.list file in /etc/apt.

Now, you need to install packages to build your guest additions.  Note here I'm not using the guest additions from the virtualbox site, but those in the Debian repositories.  For most people, the synaptic package manager will be the easiest.

Packages to install:

• Build essential
• linux headers for your architecture (headers will probably be pulled in with Build essential and module assistant)
• module assistant
• virtualbox guest dkms
• virtualbox guest X11
• virtualbox guest source
• virtualbox guest utils

The key thing here is that you want the X11 module - that is what I was missing before.  You need the guest system to use the Virtualbox graphics drivers.

Now from the command line:

• m-a prepare
• m-a
• Install virtualbox guest from menu

The m-a command will bring up a menu that when you scroll down, you can select the virtualbox modules to install.

reboot

You can now resize window etc.

Violas .. we have a string section.

Later .....