Following several guides on setting up a bridge on my laptop between the wireless network interface and VirtualBox for direct networking was simply not working for me. Today after lots of head scratching I finally discovered why.
Turns out that the standard bridge utils are no good for most wireless cards, but there is a workaround.
Check out this guide, and read under the wireless section:
Bridged Networking with VirtualBox on Linux Hosts
What you can do is add those various commands to a little script file in /etc/network/if-up.d/ which will set up the ‘bridge’ upon starting networking.
Woohoo!
A quick note that that particular guide (which is mine, actually,) is not, at the moment, working with 8.04 beta after some updates. I haven’t yet determined the reason, but figured I should mention it for those who see this. Thank you for the mention, by the way and I’m glad it was useful to you. (The guide still works in Fedora and Arch, so I think the principles are sound.)
Ok, a further note. I’ve gotten it working and have added the details to the page. It’s possible that apparmor has to be disabled, this isn’t yet completely tested.
In addition, after doing the parprouted with the wireless and tap0, I had to add the route command (not the ip route option) to tap0, e.g., route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 tap0.
Then it began working.
Thanks.