Installing Guest Additions will provide your Guest OS with the drivers/modules needed for additional features. Such as Shared Clipboard, actually enabling 3D Acceleration in the guest (assuming that the checkbox in the options is enabled) and my personal favorite… The ability to have your mouse enter and leave the VM like a normal application window. No more Right+CTRL to release the mouse from the VM (unless you are in the console).

To install Guest Additions go to Devices -> Install Guest Additions (or something similar). This will make the Guest Additions show up as a CD drive. Depending on the distro you might have to mount it (mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom) from there you just run the corresponding file. I believe they have both 32 bit and 64 bit for linux and I know they have an installer for windows (they may have multiple ones).

@Jerry I have been using VirtualBox for quite a while now. And while I have not moved to version 3.0.0 yet, they have been making great strides in the development. I always have a VM of Slackware running on my Windows XP Desktop. I have gotten to the point where I just think of it as another program running on my computer. It runs extremely smooth including KDE4 (although, I don’t have all the eye-candy turned on, due to the 3D acceleration not supporting my old version of X). I would highly recommend trying it out again.

Compliments on an outstandingly thorough article.

Quite timely, I might add, as I was planning to grab a copy of Mint and give it a whirl.

Thank you.