I’ve just installed VirtualBox on my Linux Mint 11 (Katya) laptop and get the following error when I try to edit the settings on my Ubuntu 11.10 virtual machine:
VirtualBox is not currently allowed to access USB devices. You can change this by adding your user to the ‘vboxusers‘ group. Please see user manual for more detailed explanation.
To add your username to the vboxusers group enter the following command in the terminal (where “your-user-name” is your username on the computer):
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers your-user-name
All that is left to do after this is reboot your computer.
Thanks to Sebastian for his comment regarding the addition of the -a switch to the usermod command.
Sebastian
October 16, 2011 at 5:59 am
No! Don’t do that! This will screw up the group settings for your user (at least on Ubuntu 10.10). What you should rather do is:
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers your-user-name
which appends to the existing groups for your username (haven’t tested this, but this seems the logical thing to do). Also see this post in connection to this issue:
http://x.thexs.us/tag/usermod/
If you already did the above and can’t sudo anymore, follow the instructions here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4273283#post4273283
HTH
Sebastian
Mike
October 16, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Thanks for the comment Sebastian – you were right I did lose sudo permissions with that command! I have updated the command in the post above to include the -a switch – many thanks.
I have posted my own troubleshooting steps here: http://pricklytech.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/ubuntu-linux-mint-user-is-not-in-the-sudoers-file-this-incident-will-be-reported/
Thanks again for your input – it is much appreciated!