USB problem with XP guest on Ubuntu 9.04 host

[Girts]

First I want to apologise if this seems like yet another question on a well worn path. Trouble is, I've looked for the answer here and in the manual, without any joy. Also I'm quite new to Linux, so any terminal entries need to be comprehensive - I've got my L-plates on, remember.

The VB (Sun 3.04) shows 5 devices connected by USB (including the keyboard and mouse). XP shows all 5 greyed out, but the keyboard and mouse both work anyway! I've tried re-installing guest additions and all the stuff I said above. Re-booting the whole PC made no difference.

(I tried Vbox on a Toshiba laptop, and had the same thing initially, then suddenly everything was fine and has stayed that way.)

I've seen mention of vboxusers group, but don't remember if it came up during installation. I've tried 'id' on terminal,(there's brave!) but that doesn't mention vboxusers, and anyway, Vbox works. I've installed and used Lightroom on it, so it just seems to be the USB side that's a problem.

Help, please...

Girts

[baf]

Code: Select all

 sudo adduser your_user_name vboxusers

This will ask for your password. Nothing will be printed on the screen while you type it. Then press enter. Log out and in again.
Check with id that you are a member of vboxusers.

[RickJones]

I'm not quite sure what you're expecting to happen USB-wise.

Have you explicitly mapped USB devices to the VM using the Settings? You should only need to do this if you have a USB device which you want to directly connect to the guest OS. When you do this the device is not visible to the host, so you can't have USB devices shared.

The keyboard and mouse are handled by VBox itself, the guest won't see them as USB devices as such. Many devices can also be accessible via host sharing mechanisms - e.g. USB drives, printers etc. OTOH if you have a device that you want to "plug in" directly to the guest then you use the USB device mappings.

You can either do this using the VM Settings in the VBox management application, or ad-hoc using the Machine->Devices->USB menu in the running VM. In the first case, the USB port is automatically mapped to the guest when it starts up, in the latter case you just map any connected device at the time. This has the effect of "unplugging it" from the host and "plugging it in" to the guest.

HTH

[Girts]

Hi baf,

Thanks for that - followed your instructions and apparently I'm already a member of vboxusers. So that wasn't the problem.

Hi Rick,

What I want from the USB connections is to connect a printer, a scanner, and Spyder 3 to calibrate the monitor, to XP - the guest. So far, I've installed the Spyder driver software and plugged in the unit. However the unit doesn't respond at all and the software says it isn't connected. The USB menu in XP shows the presence of the unit, but it's greyed out - which I take to mean that XP can't connect to it. Presumably, the same will happen with a printer? Or does it mean that the software hasn't installed properly?

[Girts]

I may be wrong, but I think I found the cause!

I think it could be a conflict from the Logitech wireless mouse that's caused the problem. Just to check all possibilities, I tried disabling the mouse, and suddenly everything else became visible and operational. So I replaced the wireless mouse with a cable one, and all's well.

The only thing I need to crack now is that if I want to do some work in guest and then jump to host, the keyboard stays locked in the guest. The manual says this is a possibility, but doesn't say how to deal with it.

Any ideas?