Hello, is here someone who uses VMware Workstation Pro on openSUSE?
I’m a longtime Windows user and recently switched the host system to openSUSE Leap 15.5.
When running Windows guests on a Windows host, I could connect my USB scanner either to the guest or to the host, just by connecting or disconnecting it under ‘Removable Devices’. However, now with Leap as host, the scanner is not even listed unter ‘Removable Devices’.
On the host running Leap, I installed the scanner with YaST and could successfully use Document Scanner to scan some pages.
How do I make VMware Workstation aware of the scanner?
You probably will want to ask over in the VMware forums for specific information about their software (how you do this isn’t dependent on the host OS), but you generally have to decide if the device is visible to the host or the guest. When the VM is running, you go to the devices menu (I think it’s called ‘removable devices’) and there should be a USB devices submenu that lists the devices on your system.
You just select the device, and that should disconnect it from the host and attach it to the guest.
No worries. I was able to analyze and resolve this on my own. The VMware Workstation installation on openSUSE is incomplete, the USB arbitrator service does not get started per default. This is the daemon that makes USB devices available under `Removable Devices´.
While at it, I changed the VMware services startup from /etc/init.d to systemd style by removing the old start/stop scripts and creating both a vmware.service and a vmware-usbarbitrator.service template in /etc/systemd/system. That fixed it.