One possible way to increase the disk size of a VirtualBox Linux guest:
- Stop the virtual machine
- In VirtualBox menu, select File > Tools > Virtual Media Manager...
- In the Hard disks tab, Select the virtual machine hard disk. The virtual machine can be deduced from the directory path displayed when clicking on a given hard disk
- Increase the size
- Click on the Apply button
- Download a bootable gparted ISO image from here (at the time of writing: gparted-live-1.6.0-3-amd64.iso)
- Check the checksum
- Modify the settings of the virtual machine so that it boots on the gparted ISO image: add the image as an optical drive, check Live CD/DVD, and check that the boot order will make the machine boot on the optical drive
- Start the Virtual Machine. It starts gparted
- Using gparted, resize the relevant partition
- Quit gparted, exit
- Remove the optical drive from the virtual drive, in Settings > Storage
- Restart the virtual machine