A couple of months ago, I created a debian-11-minimal sys-usb. It seemed to work fine, but apparently I did mess up one little thing. (And I did try a search though I might have asked the wrong thing of the search engine.)
When I plug in a dvd/bluray player, sys-usb doesn’t recognize it as a block device and make it available as such. I have to pass the USB port directly to some other VM (I picked a “user” VM which means one with quite a lot of things installed on it), and that VM will set it up as a block device, and it becomes available in the device manager applet as a block device. I can then connect that to the VM that has VLC installed on it as a block device, and play a DVD.
I must be missing some driver or something in sys-usb that would cause it to set up the DVD player as a block device. What could it be?
It’s silly. But it’s not a silly question. It was silly of me not to specify it properly…DVD Drive, plugged in via USB. (I’m using it as a player ATM…but that’s not relevant.)
OK, I tried installing everything that sys-usb did not have, that the other qube DID have, that was qubes-* Eventually I narrowed it down to a couple of things, then removed one of them–still worked. Then I removed the other one.
It still worked.
In other words this was a nonexistent problem.
Apparently I didn’t think to put a DVD in the drive the first time through, and only did so while troubleshooting.
So the moral of the story is, an empty DVD drive is not a block device, but one with a DVD in it, is (likewise CD ROM or BluRay).
Incidentally, if having to do lots of rebooting because you’re re-doing sys-usb’s template (and you have a USB Keyboard and Mouse) doesn’t appeal to you, then create a script that does the following. You can then run the script and unless something goes wrong, you’ll be able to regenerate sys-usb and its templates, without having to reboot your system. You’ll just have a frozen keyboard and mouse for a few minutes.
1-Turn off autostart on sys-usb (this will be a good thing if the script dorks up somehow, a reboot will then work).
2-Shut down sys usb
3-delete sys-usb qube
4-delete its dvm template
5-delete its template VM
6-recreate the template VM
7-recreate the dvm template
8-recreate sys usb
9 restart sys-usb (your keyboard and mouse should unfreeze shortly afterwards)
10-turn autostart back on.
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