Wesley Levels's Blog

When your using a Linux distro as your desktop environment, and you have VirtualBox running with Virtual Hosts, you will notice you can’t use any USB devicesin you VMs. This is because Linux doesn’t give VirtualBox the right access permissions to access the local USB devices.

You can solve this by checking the GID of your “plugdev” group, checking if you’re a member of that group (first user is a member by default) and adding the following line to your /etc/fstab:

# none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

(Where “46” is the GID of my “plugdev” group)

If you don’t know how to check your groupIDs and group memberships, use your favorite editor (vi/nano) to open the following file: /etc/group
After a reboot your USB devices will be available to your VirtualBox VMs!