Grr [Matthew's Journal]

I am very frustrated. It would be nice to be able to use the barcode scanner downstairs, which means doing so on a computer attached to the wireless network. That means, essentially, my powerbook.

I have a USB-serial converter. Ubuntu linux drives it Just Fine. It doesn't, however, drive the wireless ethernet in my powerbook. I downloaded the bcm43xx-fwcutter package and the relevant firmware onto a usb-stick, and installed them on the powerbook, but still get no joy out of the wireless - eth1 appears, but it isn't actually broadcasting anything.

Mac OSX obviously drives the wireless ethernet just fine, but won't talk to the USB-serial converter. System Profiler detects the device, notes it's made by Prolific Technologies. I've installed Prolifics .kext file, but no /dev/tty.usbserial or similar appears, and I can't get any data out of any plausible-looking /devs.

I'm monumentally pissed off by this, and by the amount of time I've wasted trying to make this work :-(

ETA more googling suggests that you may need to reboot to get the firmware recognised properly. I can't do this, as I'm using a livecd, but I tried unloading and reloading the module, to no avail.

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You could either try a very long network lead, or a second wireless access point configured as a receiver which you then plug the powerbook into.

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Would it be possible to dump the scanned barcodes to a file somewhere[1] and then (after rebooting) feed that file out to Amazon one barcode at a time?

[1] or indeed to create a folder, and put each barcode into that as the filename of an empty file, or something analogous.

One reason why this would be slightly unsatisfactory is that if you have a check when you scan the book, you are still looking at the book and can manually enter the data. If you find out after you have scanned all your books that book number 1732 has a barcode amazon doesn't know, what are you going to do? (answer, try and keep the books in order as you scan them and then search for it between the books scanned either side, but it is More Faff)

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I can see that that might be a problem, yes :)

I assume you have done the obvious like checking dmesg for errors when you reload the module?

Indeed, and it contains nothing useful. The module outputs one line saying it's there, but there's no sign of the firmware being loaded.

bah ):

(my Shiny New Laptop had firmware problems, but it complained in dmesg and I installed the firmware, and now I have wireless network in my house for the first time in over a year! The delight! (Not that there was anywhere but the bathroom that the cable wouldn't reach, but that's Not The Point))

If it's a Prolific-based USB serial thing assembled by someone else, it may have different USB IDs than Prolific's own; the way to deal with that on OS X is to go into the driver bundle, edit the Info.plist, and then load it (see kextload(8)).

Edit: Discovering the correct vendor/device IDs, or whatever they're called, is left as an exercise for the reader, because I don't remember how, but would assume it's in the dmesg, or failing that there's ioreg(8).

I do have to give Apple some credit there, as I don't know of too many other OSes where you can do that.

Edited Date: 2008-04-04 02:15 am (UTC)

Mmm, getting the vendor/device id list from a file (rather than, as in Linux, having to edit and recompile the module) is very nice.

Given that the machine can run linux, discovering the vendor/device IDs is easy - just boot into linux and look at the output of "lsusb -v".

I think System Profiler will tell me too - I'll try that this evening.

Matthew's Journal

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