On 2007-09-02 19:49:34 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Sun, 2 Sep 2007 17:39:11 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

I've found that VMWare seems to support USB and serial comms pretty
well on virtual machines - e.g. VMWare on Mac with XP VM works fine
with my Ultrasmart. It doesn't with Parallels. Likewise with BP
monitor.

I'm sure it does. But what would I run it on? The point is to avoid
running Windows. I won't touch a Mac, thank you. In any case, the
communal Windows machine is useful for everyone if they have to have
Windows...multiple copies of Windows on VMWare much less so, not to
mention the alternatives of increased expense or license violation.

Everyone in the family has at least one machine apart from this...so the
single XP machine makes life easy.

For that purpose, I run XP as a VM on Linux and access it via RDP or VNC.