USB and serial (was Re: [vox-tech] lbncurses.so.4 issue)

[Jonathan Stickel]

Ken Herron wrote:
> --On Tuesday, February 03, 2004 06:23:43 AM -0800 "Richard S. Crawford" 
> <rscrawford@mossroot.com> wrote:
> 
>> Assuming the software wants to talk to a serial port, and the device
>> only has a USB port, is there a way to make them talk to each other?
> 
> 
> If the kernel supports this UPS, then when the UPS is plugged into a USB 
> port, the kernel should create some devices for software to interact 
> with it. If the UPS requires a serial-port device then I'd expect the 
> kernel to create a serial port for it.
> 
> What does the kernel do when you plug the UPS into a USB port?
> 

You will need USB Serial Converter support compiled into your kernel 
(probably default for RH8).

#
# USB Serial Converter support
#
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL=m
# CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_DEBUG is not set
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_GENERIC=y
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_BELKIN=m
...

When you plug in your "USB-serial" device, serial device(s) will 
"magically appear" in your /dev filesystem.  For my handspring cradle, 
it is /dev/usb/tts/0 and /dev/usb/tts/1.  Then you need to get software 
to talk to one of these.  Try some googling.

Jonathan