Using Virtual Machine

I am currently working on a Mac OS machine and to access the Cu/Au board I am using a virtual machine running debian buster.

To get the loader to work I had to use the new one and install the udev rule (obviously, as documented), but this is not sufficient per-se.

Usually, once the VM is running I’m doing everything from the MacOS terminal by ssh-ing to the VM (to avoid to deal with the «GUI» of the VM). When doing this the loader does not work (or in a very chaotic way). In particular it would «see» the board only if it was plugged in during the boot, flashing would sometime stop and reset in the middle of the process… (I am sure it is not a «board problem» since they work perfectly well with a «real» debain buster machine).

Indeed there seems to be small compatibilities issues with vritualbox; so here are the workarounds I have found to get a working solution :

  • Setting the VM to use the xHCI (USB3.0) controller (in the configuration->ports->USB)
  • Opening a GUI session on the VM (even if not really using it)

With this on (the «proper» virtual USB controller, and the session being opened) I can use the loader (indeed even within my ssh session rather than the «local session within the VM»).

These indeed seems to me more problems from virtual-box than from the Alchitry software, but I guess some other might be trying to using a similar technique to work on a Mac (or other unsupported OS).

Hope this will help.

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing the workaround. I contacted FTDI about the issues and they just told us they don’t support VMs…

We are going to make a version of the loader that uses the open source FTDI library that will hopefully get around these issues.