I manage a handful of small websites and have recently switched from Windows to Mint. I was using PortableApps to keep the sites separated, and for the moment want to do the same. I’ve set up VirtualBox with a cut down Windows 10 installation, and added the root folder of the websites as a shared folder, so Websites/Site1, Websites/Site2 etc. The root folder is still on an NTFS drive.

So far, everything works, except I can’t run the PortableApps suite from the shared folder in VirtualBox. PortableApps runs and updates, but the apps don’t work properly. Thunderbird is ok but has random glitches, Firefox launches but sites don’t load, and Chrome instantly closes. If I copy the folder for the individual site into the virtual machine though, it works perfectly.

I’m assuming that it’s a permissions problem, as the NTFS drive is owned by me but is in the root group, but copying the files to the virtual machine copies them to the vboxuser group, which I’m a member of. The fstab entry for the drive is:

UUID=BAB4BFE2B4BF9EF7 /mnt/Storage ntfs defaults,uid=tippon 0 2

but from what I can gather, it should have my UID and GID instead. The examples and questions I’ve found online have some extra details at the end with no explanation though, like dmask=022, fmask=133, and I don’t want to risk editing my fstab without understanding them.

So, to finally get to the question, if I replace uid=tippon with uid=1000,gid=1000 (my user and group), would that let me access the files from within VirtualBox, as well as whichever other programs I might want to use, and would it break anything?