[Elecraft] KUSB on Linux machine??

[David Woolley (E.L)]

Dick Roth KA1OZ wrote:
> Brendan Minish wrote:

>> prolific support is in the 2.6 kernels, I have yet to meet a USB driver
>> that isn't plug and play under modern 2.6 kernels. no additional drivers
>> required

In general, USB TTY devices ought to comply with the relevant USB device 
class and ought not to require a vendor specific driver.  Any vendor 
that absolutely needs a specific driver should be discouraged.  (Windows 
device drivers often aren't actually real device drivers, but rather an 
association between the device ID code and a standard driver.  Windows 
seems less willing to match devices on class alone, except for mass 
storage, than Linux.)

>>> My main pc runs a variant of Red Hat Linux (CentOS 5.1).  Has anyone 
>>
> Brendan, this was way too simple!  I found that I had to execute k3util 
> as root, otherwise it wouldn't open the ttyUSB0 port.

I cannot think of any good reason why this would be necessary, and as a 
matter of policy one should reject software that shouldn't need to run 
as root, but does actually need to.  I think it is more likely that the 
ttyUSB0 device node needs its permissions changing or accommodating to. 
  Often such nodes have an appropriate group, and all you need to do is 
to add the user that uses them to that group or make the executable "set 
group" to the group.  However, you can always add an appropriate group.

Less satisfactory is to make the executable "set user" to root, but that 
means putting unnecessary trust in it, although it lessens the risk of 
doing something else dangerous.

 >>> My main pc runs a variant of Red Hat Linux (CentOS 5.1).  Has anyone
 >>

PS Note that Centos is a derivative, not a variant of Red Hat; Red Hat 
would deny any responsibility for it.  Red Hat commercialise open source 
software by branding it and then charging for the use of the brand and 
for support.  CentOs remove the Red Hat branding and bypasses the 
support contract that encumbers commercially supplied copies of Red Hat 
Linux.
-- 
David Woolley
"The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related to 
Elecraft products and more general topics related ham radio"
List Guidelines <http://www.elecraft.com/elecraft_list_guidelines.htm>