access USB devices from VirtualBox

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 22:14 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> On 08/18/2009 07:46 PM, L wrote:
> > hope some one offer a fix?
> >
> >    
> 
> This is due to a legacy usbfs system in use by Fedora. No other 
> distribution uses usbfs anymore. VirtualBox is coded to use legacy 
> first, then libusb.
> 
> In order to get around having to add an entry in /etc/fstab, you can 
> remove the usbfs mounting in /etc/rc.sysinit and reboot. This will allow 
> VBox to use libusb.
> 
> I've brought it up on the list before and the knee-jerk response was 
> that VBox is broken -- it's "proprietary" (which is wrong, only the RDP 
> piece is) and not kvm/qemu/xen (Fedora/Red Hat products).

Unfortunately it's exactly the USB-supporting part of VBox that's
proprietary. It would help the argument to find some other app for which
libusb is clearly superior to usbfs.

One such is pilot-link. There are probably others.

poc