

One you do this, it will automatically connect to the VM when you plug it in.

You can assign individual USB devices to the Windows client, by going to “Devices->USB” and selecting them.

(Important!) If you want to use any USB hardware, you will need to install the “VirtualBox Extension Pack”, as described here, and then enabling USB 2.0 or 3.0.The folder will now appear with the selected drive letter under File Explorer.Select “Auto-mount” and “Make Permanent”.Give it a drive letter under “Mount Point”.Select “Folder Path->Other.” and navigate to the folder you want.“Devices->Shared Folders->Shared Folder Settings…”.You can now mount your local disks in VirtualBox by Doing:.Go to “Settings->General->Advanced” and enable “bi-directional” for both the clipboard and drag and drop.Among other things, you’ll be able to properly go to full screen mode.This will allow interaction between the host and the VM client. The first thing you’ll want to do is install the “Guest Additions”, as described in detail here.In my case, all the internet stuff worked immediately and automatically, and I quickly downloaded and installed Firefox.For most users, you’ll want to go into the VM, do a ->”Display” and selecting the highest resolution.Then it worked (update: installation worked fine on Catalina) I had to resort to the procedure below, which involved rebooting in Recovery Mode and running some command lines. Here are a bunch of possible solutions, none of which worked for me on my High Sierra Machine. Note: On a Mac, the installation will frequently fail because of kernel extension permission problems.Note that I used a “dynamically allocated” disk rather than “fixed size” to not waste disk space unnecessarily. You can find the basic step-by-step instructions for downloading and installing VirtualBox and Windows here.

It runs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux, and in principle, most of what’s below is independent of the host OS, but these specific notes were used to install it on a two Macs (2011 iMac, OSX 10.13. VirtualBox is a free alternative to Parallels or VMWare that seems to have most of the same functionality, but takes a little more user intervention to get set up and make run properly. A walk through for doing this can be found here. In that video, I set the memory to 4 Gb, which can be marginal for some things, If you have enough memory, you should set it to at least 6 Gb or preferably 8 Gb. Note: some of the longer waits have been edited down in length. A video walk through of this installation can be found here, starting from scratch.
