In SuSE 10.2, the decision was made to get away from the old, somewhat insecure USB file system (/proc/bus/usb, known as usbfs). The catch with this however is some applications, such as VMWare 5.x, do not use newer methods of USB connectivity. This article goes through the steps needed in SuSE 10.2 to recompile the kernel with legacy USB filesystem support.
The first thing we need is to make sure we have the necessary packages installed.
rpm -qa | grep kernel
This should come back with something similar to this:
This will vary depending on which kernel you're using. The system I'm using for this article utilizes the bigsmp kernel. Whichever kernel you're using (uname -r to check), you need to make sure you have the kernel-sources and kernel-syms packages installed.
Now, run the following commands:
cd /usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig
make menuconfig
Now we need to select the USB filesystem. This is under Device Drivers > USB Support. Highlight USB Device Filesystem and press Y. Press escape to get back to the opening menu and exit. Choose yes if it asks you if you want to save.
Now run the following command:
make all && make modules_install && make install
This process will take awhile depending on the speed of your computer. Once it's complete we need to edit your /etc/fstab file. Change the following line:
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
To:
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0
Make sure to save the file. Now we just need to reboot with the newly compiled kernel:
reboot
That should be it. You can check once your system has rebooted by looking at the USB filesystem:
ll /proc/bus/usb
This command should come back without an error and display something similar to:
