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Apple USB Ethernet Adapter

Will this work with VMWare Fusion? What do guest machines see? A USB device they don't understand, or an ethernet interface?

The purpose is to run a Linux virtual machine in VMWare Fusion as my home router within my iMac. I plan to use this product to connect to the cable modem and passed through to the virtual machine as the WAN interface in the router. What I don't know is whether guest OSes (specifically Linux) would recognise the device via vmware fusion as a usb unknown device, usb ethernet interface, or just a vmware ethernet interface.

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3 Answers from the Community

  • This product will show up on the computer as a standard ethernet interface, otherwise it would be practically impossible to access the internet through ethernet on a MacBook Air. The iMac would just see two Ethernet interfaces (similar to the Mac Pro, Ethernet 1 and Ethernet 2), one of those interfaces could be shared with the Linux virtual machine.

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  • Actually I can answer my own question because I went and bought it on the offchance...

    In fact a shortcoming with VMWare Fusion's UI was that I couldn't specify exactly what to do with each ethernet adapter - you can do it by fiddling in config files but life is too short. So I ended up turning the ethernet adapter off in OSX Network Preferences and letting the virtual machine connect directly and use the raw USB device.

    My VMWare based Linux router did work, but for other, unrelated reasons I abandoned it and use a standalone Linux box (an Aspire Revo), with this adapter, to do the job instead. Works perfectly.

    So it's worth noting, recent releases of Linux - including Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic - support this adapter out of the box, as easily as OSX does. You just plug it in and it works. In fact it's preferred over many others in the Linux world for its build quality and its JustWorksiness. :-)

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  • Others have mentioned that you need at least 10.5.2 to use this adapter, I can't say for sure wicvh version of the os you need, but if it works on your computer from the native OS X, then it should work from the virtual machine. Apple is providing the native driver for the Ethernet adapter, and the virtual machine only sees the virtual adapter that the emulator wrote for the emulator.

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