How do I resize the screen of Parrot Sec in VirtualBox?

Mark Smith picture Mark Smith · May 15, 2020 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

I have searched and found the VirtualBox Guest Addons fix, but that isn't working for me. Every time I resize the window in the VirtualBox settings and/or the Display Settings in Parrot Security, it initially resizes to what I want but reverts back to the 800x600 square default (both the VB machine (if in scaled mode) and the Parrot Sec display, although the display settings still say that they are in the higher resolution - see the screenshot below which shows a VirtualBox screen expanded to fit my display, with a Parrot Sec display resized to 1280x800 but only showing as 800x600. If I click where my mouse is in the screenshot, the window briefly goes to 1280x800 only to drop back to 800x600 a fraction of a second later.

Screenshot of VirtualBox in Full Screen showing an 800x600 viewing area in the middle

Answer

Mark Smith picture Mark Smith · May 17, 2020

After installing VirtualBox Guest Additions, in your guest machine, open a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-x11

If it asks you about keeping a file or installing the new one, press I to select the new one/package maintainer's version;

sudo VBoxClient --clipboard

Installing virtualbox-guest-x11 package also resolves the issue where the shared folders are not visible.

And installing this package (and rebooting the virtual machine) also resolves the guest window not auto-resizing when the VM window is resized.

This also resolves the issue where paste after a reboot no longer works and the sudo VBoxClient --clipboard command needs to be repeated. After installing VirtualBox-guest-x11, the --clipboard command does not need to be repeated after each reboot.