How to Enable USB Support in Virtualbox

This is a quick post based on a comment left by Kristof78 on my install virtualbox post a few weeks ago. For Sun Virtualbox users, the tip works, so I thought I’d repost with a few small tweaks here.

I’m going to follow this post up with some screens and check that it works with the innotek version very soon.

Here’s the comment:

“By default USB support was disabled in virtualbox, so you’ll probably want to enable it. Otherwise you’ll get an error when you go into the “Settings” of your virtual machine. To correct this, you’ll need to edit the mountdevsubfs.sh file

Open terminal and run:

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Inside, you’ll see a block of code that looks like this:

#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Change it to look like this (uncomment out the region by deleting the “#’s”):

#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Save the changes and exit.Now log out, and then log back in again for the changes to take place.”

With any luck, this should enable USB support in your Virtualbox installation and you’ll be good to go :-)

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6 Comments

  1. Idan Mashaal
    August 30, 2008 at 1:07 pm | Permalink

    If that doesn’t do the trick, try adding the following to your ‘/etc/fstab’

    usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=124,devmode=0666 0 0

    Where devgid is the group number of your vboxusers group.

    Then, Reboot.

    Idan.

  2. Darren
    October 20, 2008 at 1:42 pm | Permalink

    AS a noob to using Ubuntu/ Virtualbox, can you be more specific. Where does the entry go? Am i editing the mountdevsubfs.sh file and adding a line? I would appreciate any help.

  3. Willie
    November 25, 2008 at 8:25 am | Permalink

    I tried the above to enable usb support, after rebooting the screen had broken lines all over.

  4. Willie
    November 25, 2008 at 8:35 am | Permalink

    line problem solved. it seems when I was removing the commemnts, a line of code in the file moved and added to the next line.

  5. November 25, 2008 at 10:18 am | Permalink

    Hi Willie, that’s good to know – thanks!

  6. Iván
    May 6, 2009 at 10:00 am | Permalink

    I had a erro with autodownload the .iso, here are the link for the manual download, just put it the folder VirtualBox of your account.

    http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.6/VBoxGuestAdditions_2.0.6.iso

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