kvm, and USB

[David Vincent]

Lorenzo Taylor wrote:
> Thanks for the vmware-player/vmware server suggestion. Unfortunately I
> tried vmware-player first, but the guest OS couldn't actually
> communicate with my USB devices. The control panel would see them to
> connect and disconnect them and the guest OS could see that a device was
> connected or disconnected, but it didn't work from the guest OS at all.
> I tried this with both a printer and a flash disk with no luck. That's
> why I tried qemu with kvm. Googling for vmware USB showed me all kinds
> of examples of it working except in open-SUSE,  and even a page that
> gave me the same information about attaching the device before powering
> on the vm and the person was using Ubuntu Feisty, but this didn't result
> in any actual communication between the device and the guest OS. The
> guest only saw the device connect and disconnect, but couldn't talk to
> it. Maybe I should give vmware-server a try. Could this help?
>
>   

I use VMWare Server quite a bit with various USB devices and it works ok 
but not spectacularly well.  The most annoying thing is it only supports 
USB 1.1, that makes using my backup drives rather slow and annoying.

But - if you're only trying to make a keyboard/mouse or other device 
work which doesn't really need the speeds of USB 2.0 it seems to work 
well enough.

-d