On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 13:57 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 11:15 -0500, Richard Creighton wrote:
On 2010-11-30 Stan offered the following:
I am looking on ebay at a serial-to-usb adapter to use with a trackball that has a serial connector on its cable. This thing comes with a CD for Windows. Does anyone know if this is something I can use on a Linux machine? What would I need to have to use it? I bought an el-cheapo "gender-mender" type converter from Radio Shack and plugged it in .... no software required, from 'Doze or anyone else and it just works.....threw the 'coaster' that "Doze machines must apparently need for some reason away before it contaminated anything :) I think in the case of a mouse, the rs-232 is close enough to USB that the little converter (plus it's internal resistors/diodes/whatever) need no software, just the pin diddling.
This isn't true; it does require software, but the drivers are built-in and are loaded automatically. There are only a handful of USB/RS-232 chips, the majority of which are supported out-of-the-box. For instance
And the support is uneven. While all the drivers support the basic functionality, only some support all the status/control lines or take action on them. I checked this when were were investigating if we could use such a device with very high end GPS units. These provide a pulse-per-second signal on one of the control lines. This PPS lets you know when something in the receiver was calculated, so you can time tag it more accurately than when it eventually arrives on the serial port. We have decided that the good old RS-232 is still best for this type of thing. Too bad real ports are going away. I guess we will soon be adding RS-232 interface cards to systems. -- Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST Ramböll Sverige AB Krukmakargatan 21 P.O. Box 17009 SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden Office: Int +46 10-615 60 20 Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org