RTLSDR in Virtualbox

To get rtlsdr working in Ubuntu 12.04 in virtualbox, just run the gnuradio build script and you can enable usb 2.0 (you'll need to install an extension pack).  It took it several minutes for the device to attach the first time (I was only using USB 1.1), so be patient (I thought it originally wasn't working).

While either USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 is chosen, the sample rate through virtualbox is still low enough that it's dropping packets at every sample rate I've tried, so I would not recommend it.  It does get enough valid data that you could probably work with it in many scenarios, so it's better than nothing, but I would not use rtlsdr in a VM if you can avoid it.

You will frequently need to disconnect and reconnect your rtlsdr since it seems to lock up every once in a while, just as it does on a physical machine, but it seems to happen more frequently.

GNURadio on Ubuntu 12.10 for RTLSDR

Very quick post.  I upgraded my Ubuntu laptop with gnuradio (built from script) from 12.04 and 12.10 and some of the dependencies seem broken.  I spent quite a while debugging it and rebuilt gnuradio from the script, but never resolved the issue.  I didn't try the gnuradio from apt, but I heard that was too old to support rtlsdr.  I couldn't find any discussions about this via google, so I thought I'd post this here in case someone was curious about upgrading.  I'm guessing this will be fixed at some point once smarted people run into this issue and fix it (in the build script?).

Update: I did a fresh install of 12.10 and reinstalled gnuradio from the build script and everything is working fine now.  My issue could be isolated, but my takeaway is to not upgrade ubuntu if you aren't willing to risk breaking your GNURadio install.