Getting a Keyspan USA-19HS USB to Serial Adapter to Work on Ubuntu running on Mac OS X via VirtualBox

Long title, but I want to hopefully help people who find themselves in a similar situation with the Keyspan device. I had a need to get the device to work in my ubuntu virtual machine and this proved to be tricky. My earlier attempts with an old Cables to Go device didn't work too well with the hardware I was interfacing with (parity was wrong and i couldn't get it changed)

So here are some tips, I hope that if you stumble across this page that it helps.

• Do not install the OS X driver. If you do install it, uninstall it via the Keyspan Serial Assistant app (or whatever it is called).
• On your VM, you have to add a USB filter. I found this counterintuitive as I originally thought that all usb devices were passed through and the filter served to limit that list, where as actually the filter is what allows it to pass through.
  
• Virtual Box is really handy and it will present you with a list of devices to add when you add a filter. However, this was not my friend. While it would appear that Virtual Box tried to hand it off, something got lost in translation and Ubuntu never saw a damn thing.
• If you use the auto filter option by selecting the Keyspan device, edit this filter and remove all but one of the fields. I would keep the product id field or something numeric. I think that the long text string may have been the problem with Virtual Box doing the handoff correctly (i call it a hand off, call it what you want)
• After setting up the filter, launch your VM and log in. You should see the USB device connected. If you don't, shut it down and check your filter, reboot your OS, etc.
  
• If you want to see what is connected to your USB port, in OS X you can launch System Profiler. In ubuntu you can install a device manager, or from a command prompt type lsusb.
• If lsusb shows it, it is connected. Karmic Koala (9.10) had the driver built in, so no further work was required on my part. the device was accessible via /dev/ttyUSB0
• connect your hardware to the port and attempt to connect to it via the instructions they provide. I used both kermit and minicom (both available via the package manager)