I have read the VirtualBox user's manual troubleshooting section on enabling USB ports from the host to a MS Win guest. The issue seems to be setting the correct permissions/ownerships of the automatically created and mounted USB device under Linux. I need at a minimum to be able to access two USB devices that both
work under VMware Workstation 6.x as USB 2 devices: a Palm Pilot PDA as well as an external file system device (hard drive, CF card or other similar card in a USB card reader). Under VMware Workstation 6.x, assuming that the Linux side has working USB, the VMware USB configuation and guest access are handled by a simple on/off configuration from the VMware Workstation configuration GUI, and no special permissions/ownerships need to be done (provided that VMware was installed by Linux root -- I did install VirtualBox as Linux root, not as an enduser).
Thus far, I have not been able to find where RHEL 5
(CentOS 5) keeps the magic configuration file(s) in which one must set the appropriate permission/ownership/access commands so that the automatically created USB filesystems and/or devices are available to MS Win XP. On VirtualBox, the USB device appears but is "grayed-out", and cannot be activated. Any assistance with the RHEL 5 (CentOS 5) environment details greatly would be appreciated.