[TriLUG] usb to serial adapter

[Jason White]

> do these devices work nicely with linux?  are any special drivers required
> or is linux support pretty much a given (can i use them with minicom as
> /dev/ttyS0 or something similar)?  any particular brands/models y'all can
> recommend?

Yeah, I've got a new thinkpad (R50) and no serial port.   Oddly enough, it comes
with a big fat parallel port, which (1) I haven't used in about 5 years, and (2)
takes about twice as much space as a serial port.  Oh, and no PS/2 port either, so
both USB ports are used all the time (ext. keyboard and mouse).  Grrr....

Anyway, I bought an IOGEAR (model: GUC232A) from best buy, and it works fine, no
drivers or nothing -- at least with Fedora 2+ stock kernel.

For minicom, you have to use /dev/ttyUSB0.  One thing I noticed about minicom was
that the menu system wouldn't allow me to type in "/dev/ttyUSB0" -- it kept
truncating the last character.  So after I saved the config file, I had to manually
edit the device name.  Works perfect now.

---dmesg---
usb 3-1: USB disconnect, address 2
usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using address 4
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
usbcore: registered new driver usbserial_generic
usbcore: registered new driver usbserial
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core v2.0
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for PL-2303
pl2303 3-1:1.0: PL-2303 converter detected
usb 3-1: PL-2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new driver pl2303
drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver v0.11
---dmesg---

Hope that helps,
Jason