Virtual Box and Fedora Core

What a surprise Virtual Box have regressed to preventing USB from working again. They should have left it as adding the user to the vboxusers group (which you still require), but oh no!

Now you have to do the following on FC to make USB devices available to you;

Since we of the Fedora world have to use the install script it means our Virtual Box is installed into /opt/VirtualBox

In this directory there is a script called VBoxCreateUSBNode.sh

Edit this script and look for the following code;

if test "$class" -eq 9; then
exit 0
fi

Comment out these lines so it looks like;

#if test "$class" -eq 9; then
# exit 0
#fi

Then go to /proc/bus and you need to allow rwx to all users;

chmod -R 777 /proc/bus/usb
(This is still a work in progress, and ideally you should make the directory group something like vboxusers and then do chmod -R 775 /proc/bus/usb to make sure that only those you trust have access.

Now start VirtualBox

Start your VM

And you should now be able to select your USB device.

FC14 and Skype

As the new versions of Fedora Core come out so every time I have to find out how Skype can be installed and running, since Skype only seem to think everyone uses Ubuntu, even though there is a massive FC community out there.

So today, having successfully installed Skype on FC14 x86_64 architecture thought I'd best write a note about it so that I can remember when I upgrade my server.

Firstly we need to get the 32bit library files necessary for the only version Skype supply for non-Debian Linux systems. These files can be installed as follows;

yum install libXv.i686 qt.i686 qt-x11*.i686 libsigc++ libsigc++.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686 pulseaudio*.i686 libv4l.i686

In brief the above libraries provide the 32-bit graphical functionality, sound (pulseaudio) and webcam (libv4l).

Then download either the FC10 rpm or the Dynamic build of Skype from Skype directly.
If using the rpm then install as follows;
yum localinstall skype-versionsnumber.rpm --nogpgcheck

Else if using the Dynamic file unpack;
bunzip2 skype-versionnumber.tar.bz2
tar xvf skype-versionnumber.tar

Move the directory somewhere meaningful, e.g. /usr/local/skype

Now you should be able to start Skype and have audio and video, running with no library issues.