virtualbox.org

I have just installed my Virtual box on Linux Mint 17.3 which is the hosting system and installed Windows Vista as the virtual machine and booted up. Attempted to install the software for a Net gear WG121 Wireless USB adapter and it did not open up properly. The menu popped up momentarily and disappeared it did show up in the task manager though for just a brief moment, I also have Wine installed and it did the same thing when I installed it and ran the software. Also the actual wireless adapter is not being automatically detected on either the Linux host or the virtual machine. Does anybody know of a way to diagnose this situation, I am also going to address this in the Linux mint forums to get more input.

The Linux host is probably missing the linux-firmware package but the Mint folks can tell you how to deal with that. As for the guest, if this is a resource on the host the guest will never see it. Guests will see an Ethernet device instead. If you want the guest to use wireless direct you would need a USB wireless adapter and assign it in the USB devices setting of VirtualBox.