Ubuntu 10.04, VirtualBox and USB

At the moment there isn't an official stable build of VirtualBox for Ubuntu 10.04. The Karmic build works OK until you hit a need for USB support.

The workaround I am using at the moment is to run the Lucid build of the 3.2.0 beta available here. If you run it as root USB works properly, alternately you can add your usual user account to the 'root' group and it'll work.

I believe it's poking around in /dev/bus/usb, which is all world-readable but only writable by root:root. There's probably a better fix for this than giving your user account such open-slather access but all of /dev is being managed automatically these days and I'm a little unclear on just how one could go about convincing the responsible subsystem to, say, make all the USB device nodes owned by a 'usb' group instead.

HandBrake on Ubuntu 10.04

This is not any great discovery, but just in case anyone else stumbles over this...

The current release of HandBrake isn't compatible with 10.04. If you run it, you'll find that most of the encoding options are greyed out.

The author knows and has fixed whatever needed fixing, but that isn't in a binary release yet. You'll need to compile it from SVN. The instructions here work just fine.