USB in VirtualBox for Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit
There’s no doubt about the fact that, for me, Lucid 64-bit is a vast improvement over Karmic 32-bit – in terms of performance, anyway. I’m still having a few teething problems, but happily they’re minor. One issue I have (again) is with VirtualBox and USB support. I had to install the 64-bit Karmic version of VirtualBox (3.1.6), since the Lucid version isn’t released yet. After importing my virtual machine, it booted up fine, but all the USB devices were greyed out! A seemingly familiar scenario, but I checked all the usual things, and it eventually became apparent that version 3.1.6 of VirtualBox has problems with USB support in Lucid 64-bit.
There is a workaround if, like me, you need USB support in VirtualBox under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 64-bit and don’t want to wait for the full Lucid version to be released; however it’s not (I repeat NOT) for production or mission-critical environments. The simple answer is to install the beta version of VirtualBox 3.2.0 for Lucid from this link. Here’s the full procedure:
- Shut down all your virtual machines. Don’t just save their state.
- Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manger and mark your current virtualbox package for “Complete Removal”.
- Download the latest beta package of VirtualBox – at time of writing it’s BETA1 – but you can check this file to see the most recent beta version number.
- Install the new version of VirtualBox and then log out and in again. USB support works again!!
The only disadvantage I’ve found so far is that seamless switching between the guest and host doesn’t work, but full-screen mode with the guest additions installed works perfectly.
Doesn’t work for me, I unistalled the virtualbox 3.1 on the Synaptic Package Manger and marked it for complete removal. Then Installed the beta version of virtual box for ubuntu 64 bits. When I open my old virtual machine with XP it notifies me of a new version of VboxGuestAdditions, I installed it and I can not use USB devicer
Do you have your username added to the vboxusers group?
Unfortunately, I’m in the same situation as blitzer. Running the latest Beta1, and the usb devices are seen but greyed out. And yes, I am definitely in the vboxusers group, as confirmed by the “groups” command in shell, and the user/group management in the GUI.
Perhaps the usb support is being successively fixed/broken as they release updated versions of the betas?
Perhaps that could be the case. It worked perfectly under Windows 7; however someone I was assisting on the Ubuntu forums had the same problem under XP. He found that going into the Device Manager and updating the driver for the USB controller worked. Here’s a link to the post.
Worked for me, thanks.
Glad to hear it…thanks for your comment
Hello,
you can try to launch a console, enter
sudo hald
to start the hal daemon and then launch VirtualBox from the command line using
VirtualBox
Have a Nice Day!
Worked great!
Good stuff, glad to help. Thanks for your comment.
Try this one… then open virtualbox and it should work
sudo hald –daemon=no