Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Enable VirtualBox USB Support In Ubuntu 8.10 Ibex

I just got around to installing VirtualBox in my newly installed Ibex system.
Finished the install and noticed a warning message that there were no USB ports present or supported.

I know from past experience that to have USB access in VirtualBox that you need the PUEL version from their website and not the OSE version from the repositories.

So I do some searching and found some info that fixed the USB problem and is a very easy fix. It should work for all Ibex users and hopefully this problem will be fixed in future versions.

First make sure you have added your user to the list of VirtualBox users group. To do this just copy and paste the following into your terminal;

$ sudo gpasswd -a YOURUSERNAME vboxusers

Where YOURUSERNAME is your user name.

Now let's add some USB support to VirtualBox. Open the fstab file so you can edit it. Since it needs root permissions we can do it through the terminal with this command;

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Now that the fstab file is open add the following command to the bottom of the fstab file;

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

Close the file making sure to save it.
Now reboot your computer and when you open VirtualBox you will have USB support.

Simple enough?

Enjoy!

TaZMAn




9 comments:

Dixit said...

Thanks,

It worked for me.....

Anonymous said...

Please should not use gpasswd and similar commands since they can do the same work from the GUI.

TaZMAn said...

Could you please explain why using the GUI is preferred over gpasswd?

Is there some security issue with gpasswd that I missed?

I'm curious about your statement and would enjoy hearing your reason.
Thanks for anything you can add.

Wanting to make a quick and easy way for users to fix this problem I felt the quickest way to add the user to virtualbox users was with the gpasswd command.

Anonymous said;
Please should not use gpasswd and similar commands since they can do the same work from the GUI.

Anonymous said...

Works great for me. Ubuntu 8.10 and WinXP (iTunes!)

Thanks, Nick

Dunkar70 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dunkar70 said...

I suspect using a gui vs cli is simply a matter of preference. To create a script (I rebuild rather than upgrade OSs), I will be using the following commands:

sudo adduser $USER vboxusers
echo "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0" | sudo TEE -a /etc/fstab

for non-Ubuntu systems, which do not use sudo, the following lines should work (untested):

su -pc "/bin/bash"
adduser [Enter User Name Here] vboxusers
echo "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0" | TEE -a /etc/fstab
exit

Michael Erps said...

Worked great for me.

Might want to add that within Virtualbox you need to select Devices -> USB devices and enable your specific USB drive.

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

For 8.10, all that it need for me to have USB was to add the user running VirtualBox to the vboxusers group.