I have just begun playing around with Debian again in my free time. I am running it as a guest OS in VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. Upon installing a virtualized guest operating system, one of the first things to complete is the Guest Additions installation. Below, I will walk you through on how to do just that in Debian Squeeze.

1) For simplicity, just elevate to root access to begin.

su root

2) Not required, but still good practice. Run apt-get update.

apt-get update

3) Make sure the following four packages are installed beforehand: build essential, module-assistant, gcc, dkms and just to cover the bases, linux-headers.

apt-get install build-essential module-assistant gcc dkms linux-headers-`uname -r`

4) Finally, you are ready to install Guest Additions. Please note that the command below assumes the Guest Additions ISO is mounted on ‘cdrom0′ and that the 32-bit (x86) Guest Additions package would be installed. Be sure to tweak the command to install the correct package if your system specifications vary.

sh /media/cdrom0/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run