RHEL in Virtual Box; host system file access

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RHEL 5.8 is up in a Virtual Box VM, but I can't do much evaluating without access to my host machine's files. I need Shared Folders, ergo I need Guest Additions. However I get [FAILED] for "Building the main Guest Additions module". It refers me to a logfile and there I see: [Dang, sure wish I had Guest Additions so I could do birectional clipboard access :-(]

/tmp/vbox.0/Makefile.include.header:97: *** Error: unable to
find the sources of your current Linux kernel. Specify
KERN_DIR=<directory> and run Make again.  Stop.

There is stuff on the net about this, e.g. http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-virtualbox-guest-additions-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/ but besides leaving me confused it also didn't work. First I ran into the yum command saying: `Unable to read consumer identity` -->  https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/78153  More confusion and the steps didn't help.

Truth is I don't want my server system sullied by development tools. I don't really want to 'yum install gcc' (even if I could). I want to be free of accidental dependencies. So maybe Guest Additions isn't the way to go. Is there another way to get access to my host system's files?

Thanks, /Andy.

Responses

There is lots of way, some more easy than others. You can setup ssh and use sftp, or setup a http server and download from the guest, etc. That's easy to dofrom a linux system.

You could also clone your RHEL VM and install gcc on the clone, compile the file, then move them to the first VM where you would load the modules.

Finally, you can take a look at guestfish, that permit to modify VM filesystem from the host to upload and download files.

Thanks Michael. I ended up using wget to my host system's web server. Worked fine.

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