Ubuntu, VirtualBox USB devices “unavailable”

After a brief return to Windows XP (surely it can’t have been that terrible… oh yes it was), I am now back on Hardy Heron once again. For those few essential Windows apps that I can’t live without I’ve recreate a VM in VirtualBox. All fine and dandy, except all of my host’s USB devices were showing as “unavailable”. Strange indeed. The host could access them perfectly well, but not the guest VM.

After a quick Google, I found the answer on this page:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-541195.html

Basically, I had to set up a “usbfs” group, add myself to it, and then create an entry in /etc/fstab that read:

# 1001 is the USB group ID
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1001,devmode=664 0 0

Hey presto, USB device can now be connected to the VM. Bizarrely, this didn’t need to be done the last time I had a flirtation with Hardy.

*** UPDATE ***

VirtualBox 2.2 doesn’t actually need you to do this. All you need to do is add yourself to the vboxusers group.

After a brief return to Windows XP (surely it can't have been that terrible... oh yes it was), I am now back on Hardy Heron once again. For those few essential Windows apps that I can't live without I've recreate a VM in VirtualBox. All fine and dandy, except all of my host's USB ...

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