Greetings from Amsterdam

I'm having a terrible time trying to configure Virtualbox 4.2.16 in LMDE. Some machines automatically fit the screen and some like LMDE's first cousin, CrunchBang stay at 800x600. I've tried installing guest additions using Synaptic but all I get is dependency errors. I've tried the fully supported earlier editions of VB. (4.1.*). I done complete uninstalls and reinstalls in various combos, to no avail. I spent hours searching for a solution. It has gone way past the point of being an interesting problem to solve, to being a plain time wasting annoyance. I imagine someone else using LMDE has run into the same irritation. Any help would make my weekend a relatively productive one. Many thanks and have a great weekend.

Hello Andy in Amsterdam!

Have you tried using Guest Additions directly from Oracle for 4.2.16?
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtu...ons_4.2.16.iso

and possibly
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtu...2.vbox-extpack

Thanks for the feedback, I've tried this and it made no difference. I gave up on LMDE and switched to #! and tried again. Guess what? I still can't get the damn thing to work. I can now understand why so many of the training tutorials have 800x600 screens. It is because it is too bloody awkward to get it any other way . Anyway, I'm sticking with #!. It is the perfect way to ween the new user away from the more traditional desktop environment while keeping Linux interesting.

The limitation you are seeing is with the guest OS and not the host, in case you weren't clear on that.
You should just need to select "Install guest additions" from the "Media" menu of the Virtualbox window then, in the guest, allow the autorun script or navigate to the additions CD that mounts and run the autorun script from there. If you receive errors then you may need to install build-essential and the relevant kernel-headers in the guest OS also.
I run a great many Linux distros in Virtualbox and have found that almost all will work well when the guest additions are installed this way. Some guest distributions allow you to install the guest-additions from their own repositories but, in my experience, these versions are often a little out of date and can be troublesome as they don't necessarily match the version of VirtualBox on the host.
Edit: This may help: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=609

Thanks again for the info unfortunately it seems that the link info is obsolete.

andy@andy-crunchbang:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential
[sudo] password for andy:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package linux-headers-generic is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'linux-headers-generic' has no installation candidate
andy@andy-crunchbang:~$

Its a real shame because I thought I finally have a solution to this irritation. Thank you anyway.

That is the solution, you just need to be a little more patient. What do you see when you type the following?

Hi again. I lost patience with it about a week ago and that was after struggling with it for about 3 weeks before that, lol. I'm obviously missing something in the work flow. I just got the guest additions dialog to appear and the iso installed. I then scaled the screen. I very quickly discovered that this was wrong and couldn't find any way to undo it. So I've deleted that machine and I will start again for the umpteenth time. If it doesn't work this time I'll just put up with postage stamp screen. I'm really beginning to hate Virtualbox. This is what I get in the terminal.

andy@andy-crunchbang:~$ uname -a
Linux andy-crunchbang 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.46-1+deb7u1 i686 GNU/Linux
andy@andy-crunchbang:~$

Okay, I've got guest additions downloaded and mounted. I now go to View and Adjust Window Size or Ctrl+D. Nothing happens.

I've just tried another suggestion from a #! user and I still get nothing. I think I'm just going to say it doesn't work and give up before it drives me completely mad. Thanks anyway and have a great weekend.

For starters, are you sure that the drivers installed and nothing failed to build?
If something failed to build you need to install the kernel-headers package for your current kernel (might be easiest to do this from synaptic so you can find the one with the version number you see from the output of uname.
If everything did compile OK then you will need to reboot the virtual machine to use the drivers (it is possible to do so without but it's a pain if you're new to things).

I'll give it one last go. I'm rapidly loosing faith in VBox.

The Linux-Headers 3.2.0-4-common are installed. Still nothing.

When I load the machine in VBox and click on load Guest Additions from the Devices drop down menu. I then get the Virtualbox Question:

Unable to mount the CD/DVD image /home/andy/.VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.18.iso on the machine Crunchbang 11 Waldorf. Would you like to force mounting of this medium?
Could not mount the media/drive '/home/andy/.VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.18.iso' (VERR_PDM_MEDIA_LOCKED).

In the details it reads:

Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
Console
Interface:
IConsole {1968b7d3-e3bf-4ceb-99e0-cb7c913317bb}
Callee:
IMachine {5eaa9319-62fc-4b0a-843c-0cb1940f8a91}

Then to confuse things I have the option to Cancel or Force Unmount. That is all she wrote so to speak. It all comes to a grinding halt. I'm completely baffled!