better recognition of USB devices

[dtkerns]

My Sun type 6 keyboard shows up in the list of USB devices as: "Unknown device 0430:0005 [0200]"
I google "usb vendor id list", take the first hit to www (dot) linux-usb (dot) org (slash) usb.ids, scroll down to 0430:

0430 Sun Microsystems, Inc.

• 0002 109 Keyboard
  0005 Type 6 Keyboard
  000a 109 Japanese Keyboard
  000b 109 Japanese Keyboard
  0082 109 Japanese Keyboard
  0083 109 Japanese Keyboard

...

so why is it so difficult for virtualbox to identify? It's not like this keyboard's info has changed in the last 10 years!

[Perryg]

Keyboards are shared devices and as such should not be included in the guests USB section by setting a filter. Doing so will render the keyboard useless. Same thing with mice.

[dtkerns]

PS: I'm running virtualbox 4.1.18 r78361 on Mac OSX

[dtkerns]

ya, I didn't plan on that...
vb is running Ubuntu 12.04, it's not recognizing it either, (although all my other USB devices are fully enumerated: harddrives, joysticks, mice, etc) so I'm just trying to get to the bottom of the Q "who isn't doing the enumeration correctly?"

[Perryg]

The keyboard and the mouse are shared devices and as such the guest/s will see a special Virtual keyboard and mouse not the hosts keyboard and mouse.

Moving to using VirtualBox as this has become a tech. question instead of a suggestion.

[dtkerns]

so looks like this post got transfered to a black hole

[BillG]

What exactly is your question and/or problem?

VirtualBox does not correctly identify your SUN 6 keyboard as a USB device. Unless you actually want to allocate this device to a vm (not a good idea as it would then stop working on the host), why does it matter?

[dtkerns]

as it turns out, the host OS (Mac OSX), virtualbox, and the guest OS (ubuntu 12.04) ALL fail to identify this one particular USB device. ALL other (ten!) USB devices are fully enumerated. I've filed bug reports against all three products (well, I'm still working on the ubuntu one, although I'm likely to get the fix from them first) I just don't want to get into a situation where any one "layer" just blames the upper layer by saying "we just report what we're told by layer N-1"

[dtkerns]

it matters because I'd like to use the "Sun" keys for useful things... like raising and lowering windows, or spawning a new xterm