How to make smooth USB access available to Virtualbox vm

Tue Jul 5 06:38:34 UTC 2016

On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 05:37:41 +0000, Manish Jain wrote:
>I have also used dconf-editor to set
>org.gnome.desktop.media-handling::automount to false - and in gnome3,
>the automount has stopped. But still vbox is unable to get clean
>access to the USB pen drive.

On Linux I always install empty dummy packages to fulfil GVFS
dependencies. IOW GVFS isn't installed here. At least when not using
GNOME, this has got only one side effect, everything needs to be mounted
by command line or by tools. The main reason to not install GVFS for me
is, that I don't want that GVFS wakes up my external green USB HDD. As
soon as GVFS is installed, the drive spins up and down again and again.
I guess that even GNOME3 runs without issues, if GVFS is missing, but
just auto-mount crap and the trash bin wouldn't be available.

>Is there anything else I can do ? I am further somewhat surprised that 
>an extension pack which enables USB 2.0 access is available for Linux, 
>but not for FreeBSD. Does anyone have any idea why is that so ?

I don't have an idea, regarding FreeBSD but USB support by vbox isn't
good on Linux machines. Access to an USB mouse, to storage devices does
work without issues, but only very old versions of vbox allow to run
iTunes on the vbox guest and to update iOS on an iPad by USB. When
doing it, there several times is the need to reconnect USB by the vbox
device menu. New versions of vbox don't allow to update iOS by USB at
all. Sharing data between iPad and the vbox guest running iTunes,
updating apps by USB "works", but is very slow and often fails, IOW
needs to be repeated. This happened with an XP guest (using vdi) and now
happens with a Win7 guest (using qcow).
At the moment vbox fails with latest Linux (the kernel) completely. I
need to stay with Linux 4.5.4.

The advantage of vbox compared to other virtual machines (at least for
Linux) is, that sharing a folder between guest and host is painless and
apart from this, setting up anything else is easy to do, too.

Regards,
Ralf