I installed VirtualBox a few weeks ago. A few wrinkles when actually using it.
Copy/paste
By default, you can’t copy/paste between your Mac and VirtualBox VM machine. It’s easy to enable though:
- Devices > Install Guest Addons
- Wait a few minutes for a terminal window to open and install
- When prompted, press return to close terminal window
- Restart the VM
- Now copy and paste works naturally.
Keyboard shortcuts
On the Mac, you use command c to copy and on Ubuntu you use ctrl c. It was a bit annoying to switch between the two frequently. I don’t really have a good way of dealing with this other than press command c and wonder why nothing happens. Ideas?
Command tab
I’m big on command tab. The problem is that Virtualbox eats/disables it. Which means every time I switched from my browser or Open Office to the VirtualBox install, it was awkward to get back. I would up solving this by creating three desktops on Lion (spaces.) One was VirtualBox Ubuntu Linux. The second was the Open Office document with the book I was technical proofreading (Well Grounded Java Developer.) The third was my browser/finder windows/etc. This was helpful. It let me three finger swipe as I was reading and command tab for the “little swaps” within my main desktop. This fit my mental model well. The only thing I didn’t like was that I had to put Open Office back in desktop #2 each time I opened a new chapter.