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USB Devices in VirtualBox

Categories : Computers & TechnologyLinuxSoftwareVirtualization

I’ve been using VirtualBox for a while now after finding it in Automatix in Ubuntu. Anyway, until now, I’ve been perfectly happy not using USB devices with it. For the most part, I still am, but I was curious how hard it was to set up, so I looked it up. Here’s what I found (originally posted here)

-Install the other OS

-Create a group called “usbfs” and add yourself to it.

groupadd usbfs
usermod -aG usbfs 

-Edit /etc/fstab and add the following, changing the group ID to match that of the usbfs group you just added (tail /etc/group)

# 1002 is the USB group ID
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1002,devmode=664 0 0

-In terminal, issue the following command to see available USB devices

VBoxManage list usbhost

-Use the output of this command to set up the filters for USB devices under VirtualBox.

-Reboot your machine. This is required to both recognize the new group and new mounting options

*USB DEVICES HAVE TO BE UNMOUNTED BEFORE VIRTUAL MACHINE CAN RECOGNIZE THEM*

There it is. Now, simply unmount the USB device from the host OS before booting the guest and you’re good to go.