Mounting USB Printers under Virtualbox on Solaris
Sunday, August 30th, 2009If you, like me, own a USB printer that requires the driver to load firmware into the system at boot time and you run anything other than windows you’ve probably experienced the joy of poor printing.
Until now the only solution I had was to plug it into my primary desktop and share it which wasn’t optimal, I originally tried to run Xen under Solaris with a Windows XP guest but the support for USB bridging isn’t there yet. I switched to VirtualBox but the attempts to get it to mount the usb device were always failing with errors in /var/adm/messages
Aug 30 14:31:04 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2093]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -a -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:04 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2093]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -a -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2095]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -d -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2095]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -d -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxSVC[1688]: [ID 734376 user.error] USBProxy: failed to capture device Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 1020.
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxSVC[1688]: [ID 734376 user.error] USBProxy: failed to capture device Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 1020.
Typing in the command manually showed that ugen wasn’t able to be properly mounted, poking around I found some articles about getting cameras to operate under Solaris and followed them to remap the printer device as a ugen as far as Solaris was concerned (Since I can’t actually reliably print with the printer under Solaris anyways this was no loss).
After that I hotplugged the printer and was able to finally mount and share the printer under my windows XP VirtualBox instance.
Hopefully this will help others who want to get a similar situation resolved with VirtualBox and Solaris.
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