Hi Alex,
Running VirtualBox as root is what I had to do several years ago.
During that epoch, I did not use VirtualBox but remained with VMWare
Workstation that did not require this very dangerous approach. A few
releases back, VirtualBox fixed the situation. The problem was present
with RHEL 4 and early RHEL 5 until VirtualBox somehow did something to
fix the situation. Now, with RHEL 6, the problem is back.
It is extremely dangerous to run any user application routinely as root,
and I refuse to do this as a routine approach. (Obviously, there are
specific operations that must be done as root, and I routinely do these
but with great caution and care -- root operations can be very dangerous
to OS stability if errors are made.)
Regards,
Yasha
On 06/18/2011 11:13 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
On 06/18/2011 09:46 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
Hi Alex,
I have installed the guest additions.
On the same hardware platform using the same release of Virtual Box
under RHEL 5.6 32 bit (CentOS 5.6), everything worked except for SAMBA
issues (basically, figuring out what network interfaces were being
used for MS Win XP Pro SP 3 to connect via the Virtual Box virtual
network interfaces that are seen by the guest.)
Now under RHEL 6 X86-64 (SL 6) with a new install of Virtual Box (same
release number of VirtualBox) for RHEL 6 X86-64, the USB devices are
not working.
I greatly would appreciate the details of what you did. I need to make
a new VM (e.g., a new file under linux) to install MS Win 7 Pro, but I
want to make certain that the MS Win XP VM is working first.
Thanks,
Yasha
On 06/18/2011 08:36 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
On 06/18/2011 09:35 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
On 06/18/2011 09:06 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
I am running VirtualBox current production release as a replacement
for VMWare workstation. Under 32 bit RHEL 5, all of the hardware
worked, including USB on the identical workstation (hardware
platform) as I now have.
Using the same configuration (including changes to the groups file),
but now installing VirtualBox current production release for RHEL 6
X86-64, I cannot access the USB devices. I can indirectly through
shared folders from the MS Win guest to the linux host, but for
certain uses, MS Win requires a direct mount, not a shared folder /
network mount.
Is anyone running SL6 X86-64 with VirtualBox and accessing the USB
drive? If so, have you also configured VirtualBox, a MS Win guest,
and SAMBA on the same physical machine to allow the MS Win guest to
print to the linux host printer(s)?
Yasha Karant
Hi Yasha,
I've have SL6 X86_64, Virtualbox, and running a WinXP-Pro VM working
with direct access to USB drives. It seems to me it didn't work out of
the box, but I had to install the guest additions in the VM itself to
make that work. If you already have installed the guest additions in
Windows, or try it and it doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll
figure out and document how I did it for you. Sorry I don't know about
the printer issue and Samba, I've never tried that.
Regards,
Alex
Hi Yasha, ok, I figured it out, sort of. I have to run virtualbox as
root user to get access to the USB sub-system. I don't know why, because
nothing ever gets installed as root, my user is a member of the
vboxusers and wheel groups, and has full permissions as this is my
personal computer and nobody else uses it. That being said; that for
some reason, regular users don't seem to get permissions to get direct
access to the USB sub-system in a VM but there has to be some way to
make that happen, which maybe someone else on the forum knows which
group you need to belong to or what permissions need to be changed on
what file(s). It isn't such a big problem for me, but it isn't an ideal
scenario running anything as root. So, anyone else know how to get this
working as a regular user?
Regards,
Alex
