Problems with VirtualBox Guest Additions in Kali – Quick Tip!

Problems with VirtualBox Guest Additions in Kali. This post serves more of a reminder to myself however this might also serve as help to others. Troubleshooting problems/issues with VirtualBox Guest Additions. I think its safe to say I use VirtualBox a lot, I will be lucky if a day goes by where I’m not in VirtualBox using a VM. I also therefore use and rely on Guest Additions working correctly features such as, mapped drives back to the host, USB, display options are all useful to name a few. It can be frustrating sometimes when Guest Additions breaks, either a mapped network drive disappears or your display has shrunk. Once all the usual checks have been done to troubleshoot I normally move on to VirtualBox Guest Additions. I also use Kali, where its also fair to say I have the most issues, now this might be because I probably use it the most in terms of a VirtualBox VM or that Kali 2.0 is rolling and thus based on Debian Testing. As such we have a multitude of updates happening constantly both to packages and underlying operating system. The following is my usual check list and 99% of the time sorts out the issue for Kali 2:

  1. Update VirtualBox to the latest version.
  2. Then update VirtualBox Guest Additions to also the latest edition.
  3. Update Kali; apt-get update & apt-get upgrade -y
  4. Update kali; apt-get dist-upgrade -y
  5. Update the Kernel headers: apt-get update && apt-get install -y linux-headers-$(uname -r)
  6. Re-install VirtualBox Guest Additions directly from VirtualBox:

cp -r /media/cdrom0/ /tmp/
cd /tmp/cdrom0

Make the VBoxLinuxAdditions.run file executable:

chmod u+x VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Install it:
./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

If successfully your output should be similar to this:

VirtualBox Guest Additions Installtion Kali

If you get errors in the installation you will need to work back through the errors ensuring the above steps have been executed and are successful.

Well I hope this helps someone out in a jam.