VirtualBox USB support
Posted on July 31st, 2009 at 21:44, in How To, Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualBox, Virtualization.
Recently I became a fan of VirtualBox, the virtualization platform from Sun Microsystems. It’s robust, it has an extremely small memory foot-print comparing it to other similar virtual managers and it has some great features. You can find more about it on its homepage.
Yesterday I have updated VirtualBox from 2.2.4 to 3.1. Unfortunately, the USB support failed to work despite the fact that I did install VirtualBox Guest Additions to my guest machines. The solution to fix it is pretty simple:
- add your user to the
vboxusersgroup: - check the group id (the number that appears in the output):
- add the following line in
/etc/fstab(you needsudoaccess): - remount all the devices in
fstab
useradd -G vboxusers yourusername
grep vboxusers /etc/group
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=xxx,devmode=664 0 0
where xxx stands for the group id
sudo mount -a
or if this doesn’t work simply reboot your machine.
Afterwards all should work like a charm.
Similar Posts:
- How to fix Adobe AIR’s installation on Ubuntu 9.04
- Bash fun
- vsFTPd and symbolic links
- How to install Ubuntu Desktop Edition
- Using VirtualBox for virtualizing servers



8 Comments
marcello said
on November 13th, 2009,
at 12:51 hours
need a development box? Use virtualbox..
need a production enviroment? Use VMWare-Server
Is it still true? Or things have changed (or changing)?
Regards
Radu said
on November 13th, 2009,
at 13:00 hours
Marcello, it seems that Sun is pushing VirtualBox in its VDI infrastructure. It can also be controlled via command line and it also offers some APIs for better handling its functionalities. Also there is a Google Code project that offers a web administration console for it. Check it out.
marcello said
on November 13th, 2009,
at 18:11 hours
well I already tried both of them.
I’d like to know your opinion. As you seem quite qualified on the topic…
Virtualbox was a breeze to install.
VMWare was a lot more difficult.
But I remember, in the past, experienced people used to dismiss any other solution but VMWare.
Even Xen was regarded as inferior to VMWare. Maybe things have changed or are percieved differently in the last 2-3 years.
Radu said
on November 13th, 2009,
at 18:29 hours
It really depends on what you are after. If you need to virtualize a desktop environment VirtualBox seems to be the best solution at the moment. On the other hand, if you need to create multiple virtual servers, VMware Server is tailored for exactly this purpose and thus is more optimised regarding remote virtual machine administration. Graphics performance though are affected in VMware.
Of course, the problems of stability involving VMware Server with the newer kernels is something to consider too. But if you use for example a LTS release then you shouldn’t experience any difficulties no matter what product you choose.
It all comes down to the purpose you’re after. If I would need multiple servers running on a powerful physical server VMware would definitely win the chance to do the job. On the other hand, maybe I would try a type 1 hypervisor, like Xen or VMware’s ESXi for this particular layout.
But when I need to test a desktop OS there’s no doubt that I would choose VirtualBox on top of everything else.
marcello said
on November 14th, 2009,
at 10:43 hours
kudos man…exactly the answer I was looking for.
Pretty amazing blog, too [bookmarked -:) ]
dalaidakkar said
on December 13th, 2009,
at 19:05 hours
nice! thank your very much, worked perfect
Florin said
on January 21st, 2010,
at 22:51 hours
How to convert your physical machine into a virtual machine using VMware Converter – can we expect a similar article for vbox anytime soon? I’d very much like to be able to run my windows 7 both as a VM inside the vbox running on kubuntu and boot it directly.
I seem to recall that I’ve read something similar somewhere about this being possible, but I lost the URL.
Radu said
on January 21st, 2010,
at 22:54 hours
That would be awesome indeed. I promise I’ll look into this when I’ll have some free time available, although I’ve quit using Windows for other than browsing the web and editing pretty documents, therefore I am not interested anymore in migrating a physical Windows instance to a virtual one. But if the reader requests, the reader gets.
Think you've got something to say?
For leaving comments including source code or terminal output, please use the the following tags like in the next example:
where you substitutelanguagewith the programming laguage used throught the code example (for terminal output that would be bash), e.g:To see a list of all the supported languages, please check this page.
If you want to include code bits inline, please use the
codetags like in the following example: