General: USB Fix for VirtualBox on Fedora 8 Host

I love VirtualBox Virtualization, but one of the biggest issues has been when using it on a Linux host, getting USB to work. By USB to work, I mean to be able to select a USB device and move it from the host machine to your guest machine. On the Windows build of VirtualBox this works flawlessly but has not worked on any Linux machine I've tried out of the box.

Ubuntu has a pretty easy fix, which involves just unremarking a few lines of code. On Fedora, the only solutions around have been complex scripts that rewrote file permissions when new devices where plugged in. As with everything, there is usually a really simple fix, it's just a matter of waiting. The following works a charm.

First we add a new group called "usb" and add ourselves to it. I did this by adding the following line to /etc/group, where "spode" is my username.

You could of course use the command line tools to add a group, but this is just as easy and I can make sure the group has the right group id - I used 503, but make sure you don't have another group with that ID.

Then I added the following line to /etc/fstab

Then I simply reboot the computer, (or log out and run mount -a). And now USB works a charm!