USB pass-through to KVM in Ubuntu Karmic (9.10)

You have to allow lib-virt to use USB devices.


Edit /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu and uncomment some lines.

# WARNING: uncommenting these gives the guest direct access to host hardware.
# This is required for USB pass through but is a security risk. You have been
# warned.
/sys/bus/usb/devices/ r,
/sys/devices/*/*/usb[0-9]*/** r,
/dev/bus/usb/*/[0-9]* rw,

Migrating vmware images to use in kvm instead is nicely described here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1163175.
For a RedHat image I simply ran:
sudo qemu-img convert -f vmdk redhat.vmdk -O qcow2 redhat.img

Create a new kvm machine in virt-manager, but temrinate when it tries to start installing. Simply reaplce the image virt-manager created with redhat.img and restart the new kvm machine.