USB scanner under Virtualbox

[Manish Jain]

Hi,

In the next few days, I shall be moving from Windows XP + FreeBSD to FreeBSD 10.2 amd64 with XP running under Virtualbox. I have a USB scanner (Canon MG2470 All In One printer, which I use purely as a scanner) which is software-triggered - the software is for Windows only. What are the chances that I will be able to get the scanner to work under Virtualbox XP?

For me this has major implications. If the scanner won't work under Virtualbox, I might like to use MBR partitioning with Windows XP running as a full OS.

Thanks for any help.

Manish Jain

[Polytropon]

Post by Manish Jain
I have a USB scanner (Canon MG2470 All In One printer, which I use
purely as a scanner) which is software-triggered - the software is
for Windows only.

I also have three scanners where the software is for "Windows" only,
and I use them with FreeBSD software. :-) Have you checked if you can
use the scanner with CUSE directly from FreeBSD? I know the "things"
manufactured by Canon often don't play nice regarding that task.

Post by Manish Jain
What are the chances that I will be able to get the scanner to work
under Virtualbox XP?

Basic USB 1.0 support (probably sufficient for the scanner) should
be provided by Virtualbox without problems. Just make sure the user
you're running Virtualbox from is a member of the "vboxusers" group.
In the Virtualbox configuration dialog, check "Enable USB Controller".
The device should then be listed.

Attention! I do not know if there are conflicts when accessing the
same USB device both from the host and the VM instance that runs the
guest OS... you need to actually verify this.

[CeDeROM]

You can also try SANE which for me gives native access to USB scanners that
are not supported on Windows for a long time :-)

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info