Enabling VirtualBox access to USB ports (OpenSUSE 11.0)

By default, OpenSUSE 10 & 11 come preconfigured WITHOUT usbfs active. Unlike Ubuntu, everything is ready to go but the fstab setting is “noauto” so it doesn’t seem to get loaded even when VirtualBox wants it. The fix for this is simple and is listed in the [VirtualBox User FAQ][1]. In “/etc/fstab” change the line for usbfs to: usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto,busgid=XXX,busmode=0775,devgid=XXX,devmode=0664 0 0 Where XXX is the group id of the vboxusers group which can be discovered in YAST or from the command line: grep vboxusers /etc/group That’s it, no other changes should be needed.

Now mount it with: mount usbfs (All of these commands and edits have to be done by root or sudo).

OpenSUSE 11.0 does not automatically mount the usbfs on reboot so either do it manually after a reboot and before using VirtualBox or find a way to activate it automatically (and let me know hey? 😉 Update 2008-08-17: Thanks to “[timdor][2]” from the [OpenSUSE Forums][3] who lets me know a way of automatically mounting usbfs.

“To mount usbfs at boot add ‘mount usbfs‘ without the quote marks to /etc/init.d/boot.local“. Thanks timdor. [1]: http://www.virtualbox.de/wiki/User_FAQ [2]: http://forums.opensuse.org/members/timdor.html [3]: http://www.blogger.com/To%20mount%20usbfs%20at%20boot%20add%20%22mount%20usbfs%22%20without%20the%20quote%20marks%20to%20/etc/init.d/boot.local