/Media folder access denied in Virtualbox 4.3.16

I’m somewhat new to linux. I’m running Opensuse Factory in a Virtualbox VM. I’ve enabled shared folders in Virtualbox. I’ve added my user to the vboxsf group. However in Dolphin I can not access my shared folders. When I attempt to open the /media folder I get the error message “could not enter folder /media”. When I run Dolphin in superuser mode, then I can see my shared folders in the /media folder.

Can someone help me to make my shared folders visible to my userid ?

I can’t remember having this issue with Opensuse 13.1 in a VM. I’m not positive, I suppose that I could create an Opensuse 13.1 in a VM if all else fails.

ps… I did install Virtualbox 4.3.16 and then installed the guest addon’s within the Factory VM. Perhaps that is the cause of this issue.

any help would be much appreciated.

Chuck H.

Your user must have the appropriate access rights.
Either “chmod a+rx /media” (a+rwx if you want write access as well), or “chown username: /media” should help.
Or change the permissions with dolphin.

If in doubt, please post the output of:

ls -la /media

Btw, AFAIK /media is not created automatically any more on Factory, maybe that’s part of the problem?
If you create it manually, you have to take care yourself of the correct permissions.

And the purpose of /media is/was for mounting removable disks/partitions. Probably no good idea to use it for shared folders…
From Filesystem Hierarchy Standard - Wikipedia

/media Mount points for removable media such as CD-ROMs (appeared in FHS-2.3).

the following was run in su mode…

linux-mmng:/home/spcwh2 # ls -la /media
total 76
drwxr-x— 5 root root 4096 Sep 11 23:24 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Sep 11 23:20 …
drwxrwx— 1 root vboxsf 28672 Sep 11 18:39 sf_D_DRIVE
drwxrwx— 1 root vboxsf 20480 Sep 11 18:39 sf_F_DRIVE
drwxrwx— 1 root vboxsf 20480 Sep 11 22:45 sf_VM-Shared-Folder

linux-mmng:/home/spcwh2 # groups spcwh2
spcwh2 : users vboxsf

Ok, your user can access the actual shared folders, because he’s in the “vboxsf” group, and those have “rwx” access for the group.

BUT: /media itself can only be accessed by root!
On my 13.1 system the access rights are the same as for / (i.e. the “…” entry in the above listing), so run this to change them accordingly:

sudo chmod o+rx /media

thanks, i resolved this by going into Dolphin in superuser mode and changing the properties of /media to allow the group vboxsf to view that folder

thanks again for your help on this…

Ok, that should work as wel of coursel.

But as I said, you could have just granted read and execute permissions (“Can view content” in KDE’s properties dialog) to “Others”, this is the default setup on 13.1:
http://wstaw.org/m/2014/09/12/properties.png
Whatever you prefer, though… :wink:

thanks again for your help on this…

You’re welcome.

On 2014-09-12 07:16, chaat wrote:
>
> I’m somewhat new to linux. I’m running Opensuse Factory in a Virtualbox
> VM. I’ve enabled shared folders in Virtualbox. I’ve added my user to the
> vboxsf group. However in Dolphin I can not access my shared folders.
> When I attempt to open the /media folder I get the error message "could

Factory? I understand that factory is disabling the /media folder support.

+++·················
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 17:23:49 +0000 (GMT)
From: Ludwig Nussel <...@suse.de>
Subject: [opensuse-factory] New Factory snapshot 20140909 released!

  • drop /media directory (bnc#890198)
    ·················+±


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)