[Wylug-discuss] Help USB devices under Virtualbox

[James Holden]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 20:05 +0000, Dave Fisher wrote:

> The software installs fine, and the USB dongle which provides wireless
> connection to the trainer hardware is correctly identified by name,
> but 'greyed out' as 'unavailable'. I've never had any problem with
> getting XP to use basic USB devices under VirtualBox, e.g. mass
> storage, cameras, serial.
> 
> I suspect that the problem is trivial for someone who knows the
> secrets of Linux USB, but I don't.  My suspicion is that there is
> either a problem in the way that Linux handles the dongle (e.g. the
> driver), or in the way that it passes the details on to VirtualBox ...
> although, given how little I understand of USB, it could just as well
> be a problem with VirtualBox or the Windows XP guest.

The problem is that Linux has loaded a module for it, "cp210x", a USB
serial port driver. If you unload that module, you should find that the
VirtualBox option is no longer greyed out and it'll be available to the
XP guest.

You'll want to make sure it doesn't get reclaimed on the next reboot
though. You can either blacklist the module
in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf or alternatively you could fiddle with
HAL/UDEV so it gets ignored in a more targeted way.

I suspect another option would be to allow Linux to handle the serial
port aspect of it and configure VirtualBox to present /dev/ttyUSB0 as a
COM port in the XP guest. This would require the proprietary software to
be able to use arbitrary COM ports though, which it may or may not.

FWIW, I use an Epson USB scanner with an XP guest in VirtualBox and it
works fine for me, no weird timing issues or strangeness.

Cheers,

James
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