Virtualbox and Shared Folders

Virtualbox and Shared Folders

A note on Virtualbox and Shared Folders. I installed Windows XP as a guest on my Virtualbox OSE on Ubuntu (8.10) and noticed that my Shared Folders to the host, in this case a Fat32 partition that I share with my Windows Vista dual boot came up extremely slow. A couple quick questions asked of the Google oracle, the following suggestion on one forum definitely helped me: map the network shared folder to a drive. Note: this is actually noted in the GUI when you go to add any Shared Folders -- well fairly small fine print at the bottom... I suspect there is some networking code somewhere when you go through the Windows network neighbourhood that makes accessing the shared folders through it extremely slow.

For those who don't use Windows very often, open a CMD window and type the following to map:

net use [Drive Letter]: //vboxsvr/[Shared folder name]

e.g.

net use v: //vboxsvr/shared

Note: I am using the Virtualbox OSE which is currently part of the Ubuntu packages and is currently at version 2.0.4. Your mileage may vary!