[Klug-general] Virtualbox woes

[Mike Rentell]

Dan Attwood wrote:
> after the discussion at the last meeting about virtualbox I decided to 
> give usb support another go.
> 
> I followed the various info on spodes site and on several other 
> resources and soon add usb support running and was was happily mixed 
> some banging tunes on with my usb mixer in propellerheads reason running 
> in seamless mode on windows xp.
> 
> and then I rebooted
> 
> oh dear
> 
> Now I get a message at boot time telling me that alsa failed to start. 
> Then when I get into gnome sound in totem doesn't work - the volume 
> slider is even greyed out. Sound in amarok is fine though. To add insult 
> to injury the usb support stopped work as well.
> 
> Anyone got any bright ideas?
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Kent mailing list
> Kent at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent

Not to be confused with an expert, just some history of my experience 
with VirtualBox with several Linux distros.

  I could get no joy with VB/USB on Debian 4.0 (Etch for 64 bits) on my 
64-bit AMD dual processor. In Virtualbox it would seem to find the USB 
ports and identify what's on the end of them but they were forever 
greyed out when hosting in WinXP or Win2000P and no amount of tweaking 
various config files would work. I just couldn't find the 'Magic' lines 
referred to in the handbook when working with Debian or Ubuntu - which 
was equally disappointing.

Mandriva 2008.2 64 bit was better - XP under VirtualBox popped up all 
the USB ports so I could print directly but the printers were disabled 
when addressed by any other Linux program whilst VB was running. But 
they began working again when VB was shut down.

I put Mepis 64-bit in three days ago. Wonderful, everything I own is 
seen and works. It is a Debian style distro and is fine. Same problem 
with the printers under VB - concurrent Linux programs can't print until 
VB is shut down but that is livable with.

However, absolutely none of these will see my on-board sound system 
either straight Linux or VB. The PC came with an on-board sound 'card' 
which VirtualBox determined was an unknown USB function. But it didn't 
work. All the Linuxes didn't see it either. So I have disabled it and 
popped in a separate PCI card of standard format and the Linuxes all saw 
that immediately. It configures automatically under ALSA but no sound 
under VirtualBox with either XP or Win2000P even though I have set the 
VB setup to address ALSA.

Go figure - as they say. VirtualBox is great - it lets me run my 
association's accounts (I'm the treasurer) which are Win/Sage whilst 
having all the other Linux goodies available on other screens. Pity 
about the sound problem.

My advice is to ring the changes with ya distros.

Do dat 'elp at all.

MikeR



Mandriva found the