Wednesday 23 February 2011

How to fix the USB support in virtualbox

I installed virtualbox 4 after removing the OSE version and I tried to test the USB support. But I didn't find it working so I tried few things. And on diving to the internet, I figured out that I must be the member of the group "vboxusers" to be able to have USB support in my virtualbox.

Follow the steps as stated below:

1) Go to System->Administration->Users and groups. You'll see the screen like below:

2) From there, click on Manage groups and then select the vboxusers group and edit its property. Now in the properties window, check your username as marked for the group. The screenshot below would clarify you.




Alternatively this all could be achieved by a simple command as below(Here, we are adding the user "samar" to the group vboxusers):



samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo useradd -G vboxusers samar


In order to verify that everything went well, you could type in terminal:

samar@Techgaun:~$ grep vboxusers /etc/group


3) Now you will have to restart(or just logout from your account) and then re-login to your account. Now virtualbox will allow you to use USB devices. When your virtual machine is on, just go to Devices->USB devices and select the one that needs to be active.

I hope this helps you. :)