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:

  1. add your user to the vboxusers group:
    2. useradd -G vboxusers yourusername
  2. check the group id (the number that appears in the output):
    3. grep vboxusers /etc/group
  3. add the following line in /etc/fstab (you need sudo access):
    4. none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=xxx,devmode=664 0 0

    where xxx stands for the group id

  4. remount all the devices in fstab
    5. sudo mount -a

    or if this doesn’t work simply reboot your machine.

Afterwards all should work like a charm.

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8 Comments

Anonymus Gravatar

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.

Anonymus Gravatar

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.

Anonymus Gravatar

marcello said

on November 14th, 2009,

at 10:43 hours

kudos man…exactly the answer I was looking for.
Pretty amazing blog, too [bookmarked -:) ]

Anonymus Gravatar

dalaidakkar said

on December 13th, 2009,

at 19:05 hours

nice! thank your very much, worked perfect

Anonymus Gravatar

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. :D

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