Even though Ubuntu 8.04 LTS came out this week, I still haven’t upgraded my main desktop from 7.10.

Recently, I got the Blackberry Curve 8320. Its pretty much dependent on Windows for everything. I needed to upgrade the OS on the Blackberry, so I fired up an old VMware instance of XP. Then I plugged in a random USB flash stick I had lying around.

Nothing.

Thats not completely true. It USB stick got mounted on my regular Ubuntu desktop, but I didn’t say any reference to it in XP.

After a quick Google search, I realized I hadn’t added USB peripherals to the VMware XP guest instance at all. Ok, so I added that, restarted VMware.

Once XP was loaded, I was expecting to see some entries under VM > Removable Devices > USB Devices. Nope, still nothing.

After Googling some more, I could across an Ubuntu Forums thread which referenced a VMware knowledge base article.

Basically, VMware uses USBFS to detect USB devices attached to the host. USBFS was not being mounted in some distros.

To get it working in Ubuntu, simply enter this in a terminal:

sudo mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb

Then restart VMware.

For a more permanent solution, add this to your /etc/fstab:

usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0