USB Serial Converter support

This serial driver supports a wide range of USB to serial adapters. It also allows communication with the Handspring Visor. You need to turn on USB Serial Converter support, and then select whichever of the various particular drivers you need. The Generic Serial Driver can be used with a wide range of converters, by specifying the vendor and product ID codes when you load the USB serial converter module: insmod usb-serial.o vendor=0xVVVV product-0xPPPP, where you need to change the VVVV and PPPP to match your device.

The serial port driver uses a major number of 188. Up to sixteen serial ports are supported. To create the appropriate device entries, use the following commands:

mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB1 c 188 1
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB2 c 188 2
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB3 c 188 3
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB4 c 188 4
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB5 c 188 5
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB6 c 188 6
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB7 c 188 7
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB8 c 188 8
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB9 c 188 9
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB10 c 188 10
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB11 c 188 11
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB12 c 188 12
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB13 c 188 13
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB14 c 188 14
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB15 c 188 15

You should now be able to plug in a serial device into the adapter, and use the /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 just as if it were a normal serial port.

To communicate with the Handspring Visor, you need an additional application package known as Pilot-Xfer. Installation and use of this package is covered later in this guide.