As part of the consolidation project, I need to be able to virtualize the current TV recording PC.
This means being able to capture video in a virtual machine, and the only way that seems to have any potential success is using a USB capture device.
So I bought one. PVR HPV 950 (or something like that?)
I spent most of last night trying to get USB devices to be seen by either Virtual Box or VMware Workstation 6, in SuSE 10.2, but to no avail.

However, the laptop running SuSE 10.3RC1 with VMware workstation 6 had no problem detecting a WiFi USB adaptor, with no fussing with the host OS.. I’ll have to try the actual capture card tonight, and see how well it performs.
All it needs to do is capture video. No TV watching.

The only change I made to the Suse 10.3 system was modified the usbfs entry in the /etc/fstab file, to ‘auto’ from ‘noauto’. That’s it. After a reboot, I installed VMware Workstation, and the USB passthrough worked.

So because I haven’t been able to get SuSE 10.2 to work with the passthrough, I am considering changing the server machine over to SuSE 10.3RC1. I’m not worried about the pre-release status, as the configuration is frozen… all updated from now on will eventually get me to a full release version of Susu 10.3.
So I need to decide (and log) what I’ve installed, setup, and what I need the new machine to do, and how to do it.

– It needs to manage the RAID5 system
– It needs to follow the backup schedule that it’s currently doing (find out how to back up cron jobs)
– Need to install Webmin for administration
– It needs to serve files to the NFS system
– It needs to serve files to the Samba system (need to set up samba with better permissions scheme so my wife doesn’t get locked out of files I create)
– Install/setup SllimServer (make sure that whatever version I install works with SoftSqueeze on the audio server laptop)
– Setup NoMachine server software for remote access
– Install VMware Workstation 6 (since it has USB 2.0 passthrough) and figure out how to control it in a headless mode. It will run two VM Machines. One WinXP machine with the video capture software (consider MythTV) and later set up a web server (for FTP access to home files and web proxy)
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