[svlug] Any recommendations for a USB-serial dongle which will work on Ubuntu?

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:59:25 -0800, Scott Hess wrote:

> On Feb 7, 2008 3:19 PM, Bill Bell
> <billnspm at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> On 7 Feb 2008 12:38:25, scott at doubleu.com
>> wrote:
>> > I have a couple devices which want me to talk to their serial port,
>> > but serial ports are going out of fashion, so I figure I should find a
>> > USB device to do this for me. But as far as I can tell, getting such a
>> > device working under Linux (from the USB end!) can be pretty
>> > hit-or-miss.
>>
>> Why not just install the required serial port?
> 
> Because my laptop doesn't have a PCI port.  It has PCMCIA, but who knows
> whether my next laptop will?  I have other systems which have few or no
> available PCI slots.  I could sure work around that by ssh'ing to a system
> which can do what I want it to do, but if there are reasonable USB/serial
> dongles, that maybe is more flexible.  I don't want to end up with a
> system entirely dedicated to act as a terminal server for this case.

This very question has been asked on this very list before:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.svlug/7673
The most popular chipsets found in random adapters from random vendors
appear to be PL2303, FTDI, and MosChip, in that order. Any of them should
suit you just fine.

> BTW, this isn't any sort of embedded sensor board or anything like that I
> want to talk to, so I don't need fine control of the serial-port signals. 
> The other end is just a headless Linux box with a bog-standard serial
> port.
> 
> -scott

FWIW, the FTDI chipsets do provide even finer control than the fine
control that you don't need.