There are a raft of different solutions to this problem out there ranging from adding an extra line to the /etc/fstab file to modifying your udev rules, but the real cause of this problem is simply that your login name does not have permission to access Virtualbox’s USB driver which interfaces itself between the VM’s virtual USB hardware and your real USB stack.

During the initial installation process, Virtualbox sets up a new group called vboxusers, but it doesn’t put your login name into it. Since using USB in Virtualbox occurs at the device level, your normal user permissions that allow you to run up virtual machines in general are not enough to manipulate Virtualbox’s USB driver. As a result, you cannot tell Virtualbox to attach a given USB device to your virtual machine.

Like most things, this is easily fixed of course.

1. If your login name is johndoe, all you need to do is jump into a terminal and type in:

   $ sudo adduser johndoe vboxusers

   …which will add the user johndoe to the vboxusers group.
   .

2. Now close all applications and windows, and log yourself out of Ubuntu. You don’t need to reboot, but you can if you’re the kind of person who enjoys the subtle pleasures of watching your PC start up.
   .
3. Log yourself back in again as normal. This will read in your new group membership.
   .
4. Fire up Virtualbox and start your virtual machine(s) as normal. You will now find that you can attach USB devices to all your VM’s via the Virtualbox Devices menu without any further ado.
   .
5. Pat yourself on the back – you’re done.

Until Sun Microsystems modify the deb installer to add the current login to the vboxusers group during install, these instructions should apply to just about any version of Virtualbox sporting the problem, on any Linux distro.

You’re probably wondering why I’d use an E5200 when it doesn’t have hardware virtualisation features built in? Well, the server consumes very little juice compared to the Pentium 4 (26% less in fact), it’s more powerful, it’s cheap, cheerful, produces less ambient heat, is a heck of a lot quieter and there’s loads of CPU time left over to do other things outside of the VM on the host side.

CPU wise, when the server gets really busy I’ve seen spikes as high as 50%, but it never exceeds that, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine. If I ever need this box to do anything more significant, I’ll upgrade the CPU to something that does have VT-x later on.

If you see anything unusual/missing/dead from today onwards, please let me know in a comment!

If you’ve already setup previous versions via the Sun repository, then Virtualbox appears in Synaptic as a completely separate application to previous versions. Generally you uninstall the previous version (preserving your config files) and then install the new version, which automatically performs any upgrading that is required of your config files. Thankfully Synaptic can do the job in one hit, uninstalling selected software prior to installing new selections.

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Once installed, I was presented with the familiar Virtualbox interface. Nothing has changed here. What has changed is largely under the surface and one or two extra Settings options. For starters, under General->Basic, we have a new checkbox for enabling 3D acceleration. Theoretically this would allow you to play games and use other accelerated applications within a virtual session, as it would be passed through to your host’s 3D video card to process. At this stage, this feature is highly experimental and only supports OpenGL currently (no Direct3D), and only supports it under specific guest configurations. This will change in due course, but for now is a welcome addition to Virtualbox.

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The second great change that I notice is the complete elimination for the need to use network bridges or TUN/TAP devices to give your Virtual Machine a true connection to your network. It’s now simply a case of telling your VM to use a Host adapter and then pick a Host adapter from the available list. Very cool.

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Other features in this release:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID)
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support

…and the usual array of bug fixes.

So how does it run?

After initial installation, I ran up my VM install of Windows XP MCE 2005 without changing any of the VM settings and shortly after boot commenced I was met with as Blue Screen of Death. Oh dear, however I wasn’t completely surprised either – Windows will complain over the smallest of changes.

Not fussed, I figured I’d just do a fresh installation of XP Professional with SP3. I decided to give the VM 2GB RAM, 128MB video memory, enabled the SATA controller, enabled 3D acceleration and give it a network card that went through the Host’s Eth0 adapter (no NAT).

During the graphical component of the installation process, I got this…

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Oh dear again…

So I shutdown the VM and started disabling options one at a time in a bid to see if it was one of the new features that was killing the installation process. I started with the obvious: 3D acceleration. I switched it off and began the install process again. Bang: BSOD again.

OK, so I reduced memory to 1GB and video RAM to 32MB, then restarted the installation process from scratch again. Bang: BSOD again!

Fine, I switched the network config back to a NAT-based setup and restarted the installation process yet again. I made absolutely sure that we were not installing over the top of the old install and that the drive was properly formatted instead of quick-formatted. Another BSOD. What’s the go here?

I decided to go hard-core. I disabled everything that wasn’t really necessary: SATA controller, network, audio and USB. This time, when I restarted installation, it successfully got through to the first stage of the graphical installer prompting for the regional and language options! I shutdown the VM.

I changed the VM settings again, re-enabling components one at a time until I got a failure. After some trial and error, I finally had the VM BSOD again when the SATA controller was enabled! Looks like there are some bugs that need to be sorted out there. I left that disabled and continued installing Windows without incident.

Once the Virtualbox Guest Additions were installed, I immediately looked for something OpenGL related – the screensavers. The OpenGL screensavers such as the FlowerBox ran and rendered well, though there was a slight amount of choppyness to them, but nothing serious. At this stage I figured that the OpenGL works, so when they iron out the bugs, this may get smoother.

I decided to dare to test something a bit more complex, on the expectation that the VM would crash or lockup – an OpenGL GAME. Since the screensaver suggested that the translation was slow, I decided to go old school and install the original Quake on my XP VM, using ProQuake to render the GL version of it. This is where I got a virtual slap in the face…

Quake in OpenGL runs perfectly – fast and smooth! In whatever resolution I throw at it!

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I discovered the same with just about every other OpenGL title I threw at it, including Serious Sam 2 and Doom 3 – all ran at fluid full speed, at whatever resolution. Great stuff, but I did discover one bug – only in Serious Sam 2, for some reason 10 minutes into gameplay, the video card would just stop – the monitor would switch off and the machine would lock. I could only get it back by resetting the physical host, and even then the video card still did not initialise again until I power cycled the PC. This wasn’t a one-off either. I managed to reproduce the bug three times in an hour. But this is a new feature, it’s off by default because it is experimental, and I have to say that it’s so far a resounding success. With time, the bugs will be ironed out and we will quite literally be one step closer to banishing the concept of dual-booting Windows on PC’s for games! I look forward to Sun’s implementation of DirectX translation.

Outside of all this, I also found that VM’s generally boot up a bit quicker (especially Win XP guests – hellishly quick) and that tiny things such as the icons at the bottom-right of each VM window provide slightly clearer information about what is currently being employed.

So 2.1 is indeed a big step up. Sun have made great strides with Virtualbox, and even better still it remains a free (as in beer) product! I can’t wait for the next release!

EDIT: If you’d like to see Serious Sam 2 and ProQuake in action in Virtualbox 2.1, I’ve knocked up a video and stuck it up on YouTube here.

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EDIT: 26th Oct 2008 – Virtualbox 2.0.4 now has added support for Ubuntu Intrepid. If you are using Virtualbox 2.0.4, you should not have to perform any of the actions in this HowTo.

EDIT2: 29th october 2008 – While Virtualbox 2.0.4 now happily installs the correct video driver support for Ubuntu Intrepid, I’ve noticed that it still fails to install the GA mouse support. To fix this, just copy & paste only the “Input Device” section from the guide below into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and restart X.

EDIT3: These instructions will also work for subsequent Betas or new releases of Ubuntu where the video driver works, but not the mouse driver until Virtualbox is updated to support that new release of Ubuntu (eg: this was tested in Ubuntu Jaunty successfully as well which suffers the same problem Intrepid did before Virtualbox provided official support for it).

Having a closer look at the issue, basically the new xorg.conf file is VERY sparse and is normally where the Virtualbox GA video driver would be specified, so to fix this I tried listing it manually by editing the xorg.conf as follows:

$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

…then on lines 21 to 23, comment out the existing “Device” listing by placing a hash at the start of the line as follows:

#Section "Device"
#    Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
#EndSection

…then scroll right to the bottom of the file and add the following lines:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier   "Configured Mouse"
    Driver       "vboxmouse"
    Option       "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
    Driver        "vboxvideo"
EndSection

Save your changes and then exit out of the text editor.

Now just reboot Intrepid and viola – you now have working Virtualbox video and mouse driver! Yay! Brown Ibex goodness for everyone.

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