Tuesday, 1 November 2011

Getting VirtualBox to run on Debian 6


I got sick of seeing the "Could not load the host usb proxy service verr_file_not_found" error message when starting VirtualBox. What was even more annoying was that it worked under Ubuntu 11.04 without any problems.

I am running VirtualBox version 4.1.4 r74291 and have installed the VirtualBox 4.1.4 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack (available here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).

After a bit of poking through documentation I found this page https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=33944.

Next tried adding the usb file system to fstab
1. Find the group id
$grep vbox /etc/group
vboxusers:x:121:g6ujj,ns
and as root, added the following to fstab:
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=121,devmode=664 0 0

Success! Or at least I now get a different error message "VirtualBox is not currently allowed to access USB devices. You can change this by adding your user to the 'vboxusers' group."

Checked my groups settings, and no: I wasn't a member of the vboxusers group (although I am an administrator - go figure!)

Logged off and on again and that did the trick.

Now I can enjoy the delights of testing under Windows XP again. Yes, I know I can run most of my cross-compiled code under Wine, but there is nothing quite like being certain, is there?