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!