Another Obstacle to Using USB with VMware 3.0 Workstation for Linux
Dave Aiello wrote, "I finally got a working mp3 player to use with my Windows 2000 Professional virtual machine that is running under VMware Workstation 3.0 for Linux. I thought this was the last thing I needed to take advantage of the new features of the new release of VMware."
"In the course of trying to get the mp3 player to connect, I discovered that VMware's USB support only works if the parent operating system itself supports USB, regardless of whether the child OS supports it natively. I guess this makes sense, in that it would be hard to make a machine running Windows NT 4.0 as its base OS support USB. But, I assumed that I would have no problem because my base OS is derived from RedHat Linux 6.2. Wrong."
Dave Aiello continued:
In the Using USB Devices in a Virtual Machine document from VMware, note the following passage near the beginning: "You can use up to two USB devices in your virtual machine if both your host operating system and your guest operating system support USB. Note, for example, that Windows NT and Linux kernels older than 2.2.17 do not support USB.... Although your host operating system must support USB, you do not need to install drivers for your USB devices in the host operating system if you want to use those devices only in the virtual machine." {Our emphasis in the preceding quote.)
So, I needed to run uname -r in order to find my kernel version. I needed 2.2.17. The output of uname -r was:
2.2.14-VA.2.1
I can't believe that after rebuilding the Windows 2000 Professional Edition virtual machine, I now must upgrade the kernel of my parent machine or just move to Red Hat 7.x.