How to make smooth USB access available to Virtualbox vm

[Manish Jain]

On 07/05/16 20:26, Polytropon wrote:
> No. The worst solution prevails, so we're basically stuck wuth USB.
> Sure, there is Firewire, but who uses that? Or external SATA disks
> or SSDs, which requires an eSATA port on the machines involved.

The whole vbox experiment started with the idea of making my scanner 
available to the vm. Now, with no USB, there seems no way of making the 
Canon USB scanner work under the vm. Surprisingly, the list of filters 
in vbox manager do not even list the Canon scanner - despite the fact 
that the scanner has been switched on, and usbconfig clearly shows this :

ugen2.6: <MG2400 series Canon> at usbus2, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=HIGH 
(480Mbps) pwr=ON (2mA)

Does that mean, if I can't get the scanner to work with sane/xsane, 
there is no way except to actually boot XP?

The USB situation is a puzzle : it is not as if vbox cleanly bars USB 
access. I actually managed to access my pendrive for about 10 seconds - 
just enough to do copy out the data I needed on the VM. So I could do 
the work - but given the situation, there is no to be sure USB access 
would be available for any length of time in the vm.

But, for the moment, there is a solution - shared folders via vbox Guest 
Additions (VGA). Although VGA is apparently not open source, but at 
least I can download the iso image and make shared folders available to 
the vm. That makes it possible to transfer data in and out of the vm.

But that does not yet resolve the scanner situation as of yet.

-- 
Regards

Manish Jain