USB-Serial adapter success stories?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

Sorry to be so late in responding, but I get behind in my e-mail, and
what I have to say here is newer than the thread.  So there.

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 01:28:12PM -0500, Christoph Doerbeck a242369 wrote:
> I found that brand "X" (I can't remember the brand & it's not on the cable)
> works great and is reasonably cheap.  I still see them at CompUSA in
> the PDA area.  They are semi-translucent (MAC like), about 12" long.

I think I bought the same one at the Microcenter on Memorial Drive in
Cambridge.  It says "iConcepts" and was in the PDA area described on
the package as a PDA USB serial converter.  It was about $40.  It was
recognized by my Redhat 9 machine with no tinckering or compiling
required on my part.  I use it for connecting to my cellphone for a
ppp connection to the internet.  Great!

The adaptor is an outsized DB-9 connector with about 13" is hardwired
USB cable attached to it.

That is the good news.


Earlier I bought a Keyspan highspeed USB adaptor from Amazon.  The
packaging even had a Linux penguin on it, but it does not work.
Digging kernel sources confirms there is no driver for it.  The
Keyspan website doesn't seem to know about this model.  I sent e-mail
to Keyspan asking about it (actually one of those annoying web forms)
and if they responded I didn't see among the spam I get.  Keyspan has
lots of support in the kernel, so I presume this adaptor will too, at
least in time.  It doesn't work now, however.

In the mean time I might send it to my mother-in-law in LA to help
diagnose a printer problem.  It is as though she isn't plugging the
printer into the computer and having another USB device and another
USB cable would help diagnose it.  Even if Linux can't actually *use*
the device...


-kb