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 ...

Google Web Toolkit, Ubuntu Hardy and Hosted Mode

Following on from my saga of the overheating Acer Power 2000, I decided to go back to running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and only run Windows XP in Virtual Box for the few bits and pieces I couldn’t run using Wine or CrossOver Office. This move worked out pretty good, except for problems I was having getting GWT’s hosted mode browser to show the project I was working on. The console launched, the browser launched, and then nothing. No error message. Nothing. A compilation with the shell script worked fine, but it’s a real pain to have to recompile a project just to check the look and feel.

First I thought it could be because I was using GWT-Ext. The solution they give is to include the javascript files in your module instead of the HTML page.
http://gwt-ext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2277

Alas, it didn’t help.

Then I stumbled across the solution here:
http://markmail.org/message/4kpni2fnicj4hykt

Basically, I keep all of my source code on a removable USB hard drive. The hard drive is formatted with FAT 32. In order for the hosted mode browser to work, you need to edit /etc/fstab to mount the drive with slightly different parameters.

I thought this would be worth a try, so I created a fstab entry:

/dev/sdb1 /media/Elements vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,uhelper=hal,flush,uid=1000,utf8,shortname=mixed,umask=077,usefree

Et Voila! The hosted mode browser works absolutely fine.

Following on from my saga of the overheating Acer Power 2000, I decided to go back to running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and only run Windows XP in Virtual Box for the few bits and pieces I couldn't run using Wine or CrossOver Office. This move worked out pretty good, except for problems I was ...