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