Posts Tagged ‘USB’

USB hack connects Droid to printers video cams and other USB devices

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Posted 11 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category Droid

The Register reports:

A reverse engineering expert has disclosed a way to make his Motorola Droid host USB-enabled devices, a hack that allows the smartphone for the first time to directly connect to printers, video cameras, TV tuners, and a wide variety of other peripherals.

Using a charging cable that plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter, a micro-USB cable, and a USB extender cable, he devised an improvised micro-dongle and connector cable. Getting the Droid to work with a Linux-enabled USB device is as simple as turning the smartphone off, connecting the cable to the host and peripheral and turning the Droid on. As soon as the Motorola logo disappears, you’ll need to unplug the micro-dongle.

Once your Droid is booted – voila -it should now work with the device. You can even pull up a terminal and look at dmesg to see the usual kernel notifications that appear when new USB devices are connected.

To change peripherals, you’ll need to reboot the smartphone. What’s more, leaving the micro-dongle plugged in too long causes the port to get stuck supplying power to devices but not actually recognizing them.

Here is the link to the blog with details on how to do that.

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Webcam didn’t work with Virtualbox 3.0

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Posted 06 Jul 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux

You might have read my earlier post about Virtualbox 3.0. I thought the feature I was waiting for was fixed in Virtualbox 3.0. It was the webcam support. I thought the following changelog was to fix that issue:
USB: Support for high-speed isochronous endpoints has been added. In addition, read-ahead buffering is performed for input endpoints (currently Linux hosts only). This should allow additional devices to work, notably webcams.

I installed a fresh copy of Virtualbox 3.0 in Ubuntu 9.04 and installed Windows Vista as guest OS. I added the webcam to USB devices in the settings. Vista installed the driver for the webcam successfully, but no video when I tried to use it in Skype and Windows Live Messenger. Did it work for anyone?

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Enabling USB in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

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Posted 19 Dec 2008 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

If you are trying to install a driver for your USB printer or trying to enable USB support in Virtualbox in Ubuntu 8.10, you are in more trouble than before. Ubuntu removed support for /proc/bus/usb starting with Ubuntu 7.10, but in Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 8.04, all they did was, they commented out the lines that enabled /proc/bus/usb to work and all you had to do was to uncomment them as shown here.  In Ubuntu 8.10, they all together removed those lines. To enable /proc/bus/usb in Ubuntu 8.10, you have to add the following lines to mountdevsubfs.sh file.

Warning: The blogging software changed the quotes. You should use normal quotes, not the reverse one, so be careful if you copy and paste.

Open a terminal and type sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh and press enter. Once the file opens, add the following lines after do_start () function.

#
# Magic to KEEP /proc/bus/usb working
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb ##there should be 2 hyphens before rbind, not one. The blogging software removed one hyphen

Your new mountdevsubfs.sh should look like

do_start () {
#
# Mount a tmpfs on /dev/shm
#
SHM_OPT=
[ "${SHM_SIZE:=$TMPFS_SIZE}" ] && SHM_OPT=”,size=$SHM_SIZE”
domount tmpfs shmfs /dev/shm tmpfs -onosuid,nodev$SHM_OPT

#
# Mount /dev/pts. Master ptmx node is already created by udev.
#
domount devpts “” /dev/pts devpts -onoexec,nosuid,gid=$TTYGRP,mode=$TTYMODE
}
#
# Magic to KEEP /proc/bus/usb working
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb  ##there should be 2 hyphens before rbind, not one. The blogging software removed one hyphen

case “$1″ in
“”)
echo “Warning: mountdevsubfs should be called with the ’start’ argument.” >&2
do_start
;;
start)

Save the file and close it. Reboot the system and you are good to go.

Update: Ubuntu Virtualbox documentation says you have to insert those lines inside the do_start() function, just before the closing }. That didn’t work when I tried to install my USB laser printer. Putting it outside worked. What I did now was, I added the same lines inside too, but my Virtualbox USB is still not working.

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BBC moves to Linux for TV production

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Posted 06 Mar 2008 — by Arun
Category News

BBC is moving to Linux for tapeless TV production. The current process of copying to digital tapes is expensive and error prone, so BBC research team developed Ingex for tapeless TV production using Linux.

Ingex is used to get the TV footage from the studio into the post-production editing suite by intercepting it via the Serial Digital Interface (SDI), a digital broadcast standard, rather than from tape. SDI capture card does software encoding with ffmpeg and writes MXF files, which can be stored on a NAS server or a USB drive. USB drive can be physically transported to post-production.

Once the USB drive arrives at post production, the AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) and MXF files are copied to the Avid editing “bin” for post-production. The team set up two dual quad-core Intel systems with 4Gb of RAM and
4Tb of disk storage with the XFS file system. OpenSUSE Linux is the operating system.

Source: ComputerWorldUK.

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DLink DWL-G120 usb wireless adapter worked with TIVO

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Posted 15 Nov 2007 — by Arun
Category General

I earlier had a DLink USB wireless adapter (802.11b) that I lost when I moved to my new house. I then looked at Tivo’s network adapter list and bought Netgear WG111 (US). Netgear WG111 works with Tivo only if the serial number in the box is either WG72 or 130. The Netgear adapter I bought in Bestbuy and Office Depot had different serial numbers (I don’t think you can get a new WG111 adapter with those serial numbers). Those didn’t work.

I then ordered DWLG120 from Overstock.com. They had a good deal on that with $1 for shipping. I received the package 2 days back. Tivo recognized the DLink DWL-G120, but as given in Tivo’s support site, WPA didn’t work. It worked fine with WEP protocol. The USB adapter didn’t come in the factory package. I’m not sure if that piece was returned by someone, but the box was a plain one (not a DLink pacakage) and the driver CD ( I didn’t check the CD yet to see if it was DLink driver or something else) that came with it was a CD-R without any label. The CD didn’t have DLink label or for that matter any label. I think someone copied the driver on to that CD and forgot to print the label or forgot to write the details on the CD top? I have put the photos of the package and the CD below.

I could finally connect my Tivo box with the internet now.

Dscn0728

(Package)

Dscn0730

(CD Top)

Dscn0731

(CD Bottom)

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USB not working with Virtualbox in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

16 Comments
Posted 26 Oct 2007 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I first installed Virtualbox OSE (Open Source Edition) from Ubuntu repo. I didn’t see any option to load USB devices in the settings. The OSE version was 1.5 whereas the current Virtualbox version is 1.5.2. I thought, may be the OSE edition doesn’t support USB devices, so I removed the OSE edition and installed Virtualbox from Virtualbox.org. Even that didn’t show any option to load USB devices. I then found out from Virtualbox site that Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon removed support for /proc/bus/usb. If you have the same issue, this is what you have to do to fix it (Thanks to Virtualbox for the tip).

Open a terminal and type

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Go to the lines as shown below:

#
# 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

Uncomment the last 4 lines and make it look like below:

#
# 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

Close and restart virtualbox. You should see the USB options in the settings. You can add the devices you want. I have edited and added this information to the Virtualbox installation tips I wrote few months back.

If you are wondering what is the difference between Virtualbox and Virtualbox OSE, they are both same except the closed source one carries some enterprise features. Here is the list of features that are there in the closed source version, but absent in open source one:

  • Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server

This component implements a complete RDP server on top of the virtual hardware and allows users to connect to a virtual machine remotely using any RDP compatible client.

  • USB support

VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and supports passing through USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines.

  • USB over RDP

This is a combination of the RDP server and USB support allowing users to make USB devices available to virtual machines running remotely.

  • iSCSI initiator

VirtualBox contains a builtin iSCSI initiator making it possible to use iSCSI targets as virtual disks without the guest requiring support for iSCSI.

What I initially suspected (USB not supported in OSE edition) seems to be true and may not work even after you follow the steps given above.

Source: Virtualbox

Virtualbox13

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