Combining Dropbox and Virtualbox

Two of my favourite pieces of software at the moment are Dropbox and Virtualbox, both free and easy to setup.

If you find yourself using multiple Virtual Machines it may be useful to use Virtualbox's Shared Folders feature and point this to your Dropbox.  Nice if you have a set of testcases that you want to run on multiple OS'es.

So assuming you have a Windows Host and Solaris guest :

Create a shared folder in VirtualBox, point the share to your Dropbox folder, in my case "My Dropbox" which is on the desktop.

Call the share "Dropbox".

Start the Solaris VM.

Open Terminal.

login as root:

cd Desktop

mkdir Dropbox


mount -t vboxsf Dropbox ~/Desktop/Dropbox

For Ubuntu VM's you can download the Dropbox client or try this as root:

sharename="Dropbox"; 
mkdir /mnt/$sharename \
chmod 777 /mnt/$sharename \ 
mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 $sharename /mnt/$sharename \
ln -s /mnt/$sharename $HOME/Desktop/$sharename