I’ve been facing an annoying issue to use my USB devices on a VirtualBox guest system (on a Kubuntu host). The problem was that the devices were listed but I couldn’t use them – they were “unavailable”.
Just to confirm, I ran this command on a shell:
VBoxManage list usbhost(if you run this too, make sure that your devices aren’t busy)
After some research and a talk in some IRC channels, I found out what I just suspected: it was just a permission issue.
Some deeper look ups and I found two simple possible ways to solve this
- [try this one first] Add yourself to the vboxusers group.
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers $USERAfter this, log out then log back in to the change take effect. Don’t need to restart you system. Now the USB devices may be available on VirtualBox.
- Change permissions to the device address
The previous solution must work, but anyway, here’s an alternative solution. Has some security disadvantages, though.
- Run this:
VBoxManage list usbhostand copy the address of your device. It may begin with/devor/procand end with a number (like003. - Set read+write permission to the address:
chmod 777 /dev/address - Then turn on your guest OS on and you might see your USB device available.
- Run this:
Hope it solve the problem. =]
