USB In VMware Server 1.0 on Linux

Tonight I was trying to access a USB flash drive on my Windows XP Professional VM that I have running on my openSuSE Linux 10.3 VM host, running VMware Server 1.0.4. However, I could not get it recognized in the VMware Server Console, and thus not in the VM either.




After a bit of Googling, I discovered the problem is with the USBFS implementation on openSuSE 10. (Link) The fix is VERY simple, just enter the following command with root priviledge:

mount -t usbfs /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

You will need to power cycle the VM, then the USB device list should be populated.




To prevent having to load this command every time I reboot my VM host machine, I added it as the last line in the vmware startup script in /etc/init.d/vmware

Hope this helps!