I could not be happier. I am writing this post from within my Hardy Heron install while VirtualBox churns away behind my firefox window. Churning away at what? Churning away with Windows XP, which is busy flashing my X-ROM GameBoy Advance cart with some of my archived gameboy ROMS…
Thanks to the USB support provided with the PUEL version of VirtualBox, I am once again able to flash my carts with my backed up games for pending road trips – a 5 day excursion to PCB in this instance… Also, in the spirit of giving credit where credit due, a very informative post over at ubuntu-unleashed.com lead me through the steps to get it all up and running.. For the sake of indexed information, I will post my consolodated instruction set for the process for any who may stumble here because of this post…
Installing Sun’s VirtualBox with USB support in Hardy Heron
- Download VirtualBox PUEL Binaries from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
- Install downloaded VirtualBox DEB
- Add user to vboxusers
- Edit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh (uncomment last 4 lines) :
#Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
- Check /etc/group for user and group ID(grep vbox /etc/group)
Example: vboxusers:x:123:eznet
- Edit fstab (etc/fstab) by appending the following (note group id):
## usbfs is the USB group in fstab file:
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=123,devmode=664 0 0
- edit /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh – add following ABOVE the line: “# Mount spufs, if Cell Broadband processor is detected” :
## Mount the usbfs for use with Virtual Box
domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev,devgid=123,devmode=664
- Reboot
- Load up VirtualBox (Applications->System Tools->Sun xVM VirtualBox)
- Install WindowsXP in virtual machine (not explained here)
- After system is fully installed, configure VirtualBox to your needs
- Add USB device support to VirtualBox by clicking ‘Settings’ while virtual machine is powered off
- Click ‘USB’ from settings in left panel
- Enable USB and USB 2.0 Controllers
- Add Filter From Device (ALT-INS) and select your device (if not named, enter lsusb from shell and google vendor and product ids – something like this: lsusb shows 4542:4144, then google vid 4542 pid 4144) and click OK
- Boot up XP and hopefully all will be well for you as it was for me!
Now I am off to try out the iPod support 🙂
Matt