How to (manually) mount a shared folder with VBox with Ubuntu guest.

Well, it is supposed that this "mounting/sharing thing" should do it all automatically, and seems like for many people it does, but sadly not for me.

I've been using vbox for the last few years, and I have never been able to use that functionality, not at least without some console work first. The problem is that every time I want to share something, providing I don't have access to what I need via gmail or ssh, I need to use some sort of share folder between my host and my guest. So I always find my self in the situation where I don't know how to do it, and my google-job starts over again.

So, this time I wanna record what I've done (and perhaps millions of others, previously), so that I could find it easily later (and others, too).

Well my guest is a Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 64 bits) and my Host is Mac OSX 10.7.5.

So, first I create the shared folder in Vbox, as shown in the figure below:

Here we can see the directory Iam trying to share, and the name I gave it, "opnet" (this I will be using later in the mount command at the shell).

Once I click "Ok", it is supposed to auto mount in the /media directory of my guest (Ubuntu), but that's not what happens.

So, in order to use the directory, I have to open a terminal session, and mount the directory with the command:

sudo mount -t vboxsf opnet /media/shared-folder

Ok, and that's it. Now I have access to the opnet resource in my Ubuntu Guest.

Reference

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#sharedfolders