Hello Lew and all, Lew Wolfgang wrote: > After a lot of fiddling and non-deterministic behavior I isolated the > problem to multiple mounting of the usbfs filesystem. As of VirtualBox 2.1.2 (with a couple of fixes in 2.1.4), USB on Linux hosts should work without mounting /proc/bus/usb at all. Judging from the reports (like this thread), this does not work for everyone. It would be great if some of the people experiencing problems could help to troubleshoot this.
First of all, I will briefly explain the technical background. In order for guests to access USB devices, they have to be able to read and write the device nodes for those devices. Those device nodes are now found under /dev/bus/usb. (To find out which node belongs to which device, look for the device in the output of the "lshal" application.) If everything is set up correctly, most of the USB device nodes (that is, those that are not assigned to someone else by the system) should be readable and writable to the group "vboxusers". So users who want to use USB in VirtualBox should of course be members of that group. (BTW, when a user becomes a member of a group in Linux, they have to log in and out again before the change really takes effect.) VirtualBox can detect the devices even if the user can't read or write them - this is when the devices are shown as "greyed out". So, if things are not working, some things to look at for starters are: * Does the group "vboxusers" exist, and which users are members? $ cat /etc/group | grep vboxusers vboxusers:x:1001:michael * Logging in and out, or rebooting will guarantee that those users really are members of the groups. * Is the device node of the device you want to access readable and writable for that group? e.g. $ ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001/001 crw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 189, 0 2009-02-24 08:46 /dev/bus/usb/001/001 Knowing what is going wrong here would help to get this working properly. Regards and thanks, Michael _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
