Install VirtualBox with USB support
If you've installed VirtualBox as instructed in my tutorial “Install and configure VirtualBox for virtual OSes†you most likely have discovered that the open source edition of VirtualBox does not have USB support. In fact there are a few other features the open source edition does not offer that the closed-source edition does (such as offering the Remote Display Protocol so you can connect to a virtual machine remotely). But to get these features you will have to uninstall your current VirtualBox OSE installation, install the closed source version, and then configure your set up to allow USB support. It's not difficult so pretty much anyone can undertake this. In this article you will see how to uninstall VirtualBox OSE, install VirtualBox, and configure VirtualBox to allow USB support. For the purposes of this article, I will using a Ubuntu 9.04 installation to make things easy. NOTE: If you have virtual machines installed you will lose the data on those VMs.
If you've installed VirtualBox as instructed in my tutorial “Install and configure VirtualBox for virtual OSes†you most likely have discovered that the open source edition of VirtualBox does not have USB support. In fact there are a few other features the open source edition does not offer that the closed-source edition does (such as offering the Remote Display Protocol so you can connect to a virtual machine remotely). But to get these features you will have to uninstall your current VirtualBox OSE installation, install the closed source version, and then configure your set up to allow USB support. It's not difficult so pretty much anyone can undertake this. In this article you will see how to uninstall VirtualBox OSE, install VirtualBox, and configure VirtualBox to allow USB support. For the purposes of this article, I will using a Ubuntu 9.04 installation to make things easy. NOTE: If you have virtual machines installed you will lose the data on those VMs.
