ok i purchased a cheap usb-to-serial converter off ebay.. very generic HK thing. of course it only came with windows drivers and no indication that it would work in linux so i’ll go through the process of trying to get one of these things to work.

start off with a terminal and run lsusb this list all your usb devices

kubuntu2:~# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 4348:5523
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000


From this output we can see that my usb-to-serial connector is plugged into bus 004

So we’ll try and get it running using the generic kernel module. as root or sudo on both this lines go.

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x4348 product=0x5523
modprobe pl2303

as you can see we’ve taken the 4348 and 5523 numbers from our lsusb output and used them as our vendor and product identifiers

we can how check dmesg

[ 285.140496] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
[ 285.231366] usbserial_generic 4-2:1.0: generic converter detected
[ 285.232808] usb 4-2: generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 285.232989] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[ 285.232993] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
[ 304.352347] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for pl2303
[ 304.353133] usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
[ 304.353142] drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver


well it looks like it did something. i know how a usb device in my dev folder now to test it.

At the moment I’m trying to test it with my ups so far it’s no good… i changed the port=/dev/ttyS0 to port=/dev/ttyUSB0
and i get error messages back saying that it can’t find the ups… bummer

Most of you know read my blog, you know who you are (kym…) know i’m off to linux.conf.au is in Melbourne this year

Registrations are open and I’ve booked my ticket with linux.conf.au and 7 night accommodation in Trinity so that totalled to about $609 .

And Tiger airways have decided to set up shop in Newcastle so we decided to book tickets with them and take advantage of there 50% off sale so flights to Melbourne was $25 per person and $50 to come home again.

With in all this booking and credit card purchases i had to ring netbank (commonwealth bank) to get them to reset a password as i forgot mine. seems every time i ring tech support they try to sell me something this time it was a $500 increase on my Credit card.

So now i can spend even more money in Melbourne 😀

Kym wanted a rss feed of the our planet rss reader, so i sat and did a re-read of the of the planet install file and after changing a ini file to include the rss20.tmpl file and waited for the cron job to run, here you are a rss20 feed of the planet which reads 6 other rss feeds.

http://planet.newcastlelug.org/rss20.xml

You can complain or comment in the comment section of my blog… if you follow enough links.

Westnet sponsored mirror guys 3FL seem to be restructuring there mirrors in australia, so i decided to look if they fixed the apt-proxy problem with ubuntu but it seems they have solved this by implementing a full mirror. Very impressed. i’ll have to update the list of australian apt mirrors soon to reflect this https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AustralianTeam/LocalAptMirrors

While mucking around i also notice now with gusty we have alot more australian mirrors in the offical listing if you go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources from the drop down list “Download From” select “Other” then you get a list of all mirrors . You can see alot more isp mirrors are listed than the normal 3 last time i checked.

Unlikely Ubuntu 7.04 from 6.10 there aren’t too many features in the way of new programs, but 7.10 is filled with driver updates.

Some of these important driver updates is a kernel upgrade 2.6.22-14

New printer driver support

the new xorg which everyone has been waiting for.

and to my surprise win modems support.

When i did my upgrade on my Intel based laptops which intel graphics, wireless and sound. I was very shocked when i booted up 7.10 beta to find the Restricted Drivers manager launching. To ask me if I want to install the modem driver. i’ve never used the 56k modem on this laptop ever.

So far there has been a huge amount updates between BETA and RC so if you plan on upgrading to BETA wait until you get your RC version.

Gusty appears to be a strong update with nothing really new and flash but plenty of driver and other little software updates

ok so I got a bit bored. Yesterday i decided to install a planet for the lug members are there are a couple interesting blogs. why? because i was reading planet.linux.org.au and released that i read most of my favourite blogs on this site.. put not all so i wanted to cut down the number of websites i have to visit.

Installation process

Installing wasn’t that hard grab the python code zipped up from http://www.planetplanet.org/

extract the data, and well start reading the INSTALL doc.

Basics are easy enough

• upload to your web server (i uploaded everything expect the .bzr folder as it has too many small files in it)
• edit the config files
• Setup Cron Job

ok the parts which took some time and googling

file permissions – all the .py files didn’t have a execute file permission so my cron jobs came back with permission denied, it seems that the file permissions change when you upload to the ftp server.

playing with making it pretty … well this hasn’t really happened yet.. i might see if someone else wants to edit the css file…

anyway here it is my first planet http://planet.newcastlelug.org/