I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )
Tag: Ubuntu Linux
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VMware server usb devices not listed on Mandriva host
I’ve been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I’ve mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating system is Mandriva 2006)…. nothing was listed, in spite of several devices being plugged in (and unmounted from the host.) So, I looked around and found that according to this…. that vmware feature requires USBFS to be mounted on /proc/bus/usb …. Some systems that don’t do this by default are…. Ubuntu Linux 6.06, SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit……………. so how do you fix it?
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3GB USB bootable Micro Hard drive with Ubuntu Linux
Just found a reference to this product at barrapunto.com. It’s a 3GB microdrive in a “big usb cracker”kind of form factor. (Not solid state, it does have moving parts I understand.) It comes with Ubuntu linux preinstalled with Office suite/web browser, all the trimings. It will boot on PC’s that support booting from USB. Of course any changes are saved to the micro drive itself, and no touches are made to the computer systems internal drive. It’s about 35 grams, the size of a square lighter and is selling for 135 Euros.
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