The ScooterBlog

I recently came across a couple of excellent deals, one through Woot, and one through Amazon. The first was a GE cordless phone with a 7″ picture frame for $40. It was an awesome price and finally a point where I was willing to get into the whole digital picture frame market, and it had a nice quality cordless phone to go with it.

There’s just one problem with this setup: I don’t own a landline! So, I needed to find a way to make this work with some sort of service. Seeing as I didn’t really feel like buying something new like Magicjack when I already own a perfectly good Skype account with cheap outgoing calls ($3/month), I went on the hunt for a phone adapter. I found the D-Link DPH-50U USB telephone adapter.

After ordering from Amazon for the excellent price of $19.99, I discovered a sad reality: it’s not designed to work with anything 64-bit. But, there’s not much out there like it at that price point, so it’s worth it to try and hack something together to make it work.

The logic behind how to do it was solid. The implementation, sadly, not as smooth.

The idea was simple. Use Virtualbox to make a 32-bit VM, install XP and Skype, use the USB support to wrap the device into the VM, and then use it like normal through the VM. The XP install was smooth, and with a little bit of elbow grease, Virtualbos was able to wrap up the “unknown device” tbat x64 could do nothing with and bring it into a 32-bit VM. I sense this will be more and more useful in the future, the ability to do this really is pretty nifty.

The problem? Skype crashed every time I tried to load it up. There is a nice forum thread on it HERE. The two possible answers suggested were to downgrade Skype to 3.5 or enable hardware virtualization. Sadly, my cheapie E2200 CPU does not support that, so the downgrade was the option that I had to go with. Unfortuntely, Skype ate up a ton of CPU, did not run smoothly and thus did not work as expected. I successfully made it work in principle and the beginnings of it in practice, but my home PC limited my options.

So, what did I do? Found an old x86 laptop, plugged it in, and it worked great. Fell back to physical compatibility, not just virtual compatibility. Still, it’s good to learn how Virtualbox’s USB support works and that it’s able to grab and passthru any “unknown device” that is only x86 compatible. In a bind, that could prove quite helpful.

Feel free and command if you’ve tried this device out in x64, and if you had similar luck in your attempts to hack it together.