Although I have been using Linux exclusively for a long time now, there are still occasions where some pesky applications demand a Windows environment. For those rare moments, I have Windows XP installed as a guest OS on VirtualBox. VirtualBox is an absolutely wonderful virtualization tool that provides almost every function I need from a Windows box.
Recently however, I had to plug in a USB device to the Guest OS and I found out that the USB device menu is grayed out, preventing me from switching the device over from the host to the guest. I tried messing with the settings but none seemed to have an effect. A quick search of the internet revealed this article which worked like a charm!
First create a new group and add yourself to it
sudo groupadd usb
sudo usermod -G usb `whoami`
Find out the gid of the new group by running the following command
MYGID=`cat /etc/group | grep usb | awk -F ":" '{print $3}'`
Create a new entry in fstab
sudo echo "none /sys/bus/usb/drivers usbfs devgid=$MYGID,devmode=664 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
Restart the computer
sudo reboot
Now when you start VirtualBox, the USB devices can be freely assigned to the guest OS.
hi there and thanx for that. this way it works fine if you only use virtualbox but all my other usb-things were no longer useable.
ReplyDeletein my example, my umts-modem was no longer accessible (usb0).
i did the following to fix:
changed the mountpoint to a free directory. i made one with "mkdir /usbfs" and used that instead of /sys/bus/usb/drivers.
now everything works fine.
best wishes, boris goroncy