Re: Laptop suggestions?

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:17:54AM +0200, Achim Patzner wrote:
Drivers? Who cares. Serial port? Just plug in an USB-to-serial.

You've obviously never used a USB-to-serial adapter. Are you aware of
the fact that there is no serial device class as part of the USB
specification? (Quite a great irony, if you ask me. Universal SERIAL
Bus, yet no serial device class...) AFAIK, there isn't even a draft
proposal for such.

You *must* have drivers for a USB-to-serial adapter. And every adapter
is different, depending upon the adapter chipset used, many of which are
not disclosed in product specifications, so there's no way to guarantee
it'll work with FreeBSD. On -stable (I believe) some people have
mentioned which USB-to-serial adapters work great under FreeBSD and
Windows, while others are horrible (dropping characters, broken flow
control, interrupt issues, and many other problems).

It's a perfect machine for the desktop; I've forbidden FreeBSD to come
creeping out the server room some years ago. I need it for keeping the
penguins away, it's really good at that (no wonder - pitchforks do
hurt).
But it's a pain for desktoppy things - so why shouldn't I use something
less useful? And the other way round: Running Mac OS X Server is the
most painful thing I've ever been paid for; I've been replacing a lot of
them with FreeBSD-based servers.

The amount of rhetoric in these two paragraphs is amazing; I literally
cannot tell if you're trolling with anti-FreeBSD propaganda, or if
you're trolling with pro-FreeBSD propaganda. Congratulations, you've
confused at least one reader.

--
| Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |

_______________________________________________
freebsd-hackers@xxxxxxxxxxx mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxx"

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Laptop suggestions?
    ... You've obviously never used a USB-to-serial adapter. ... the fact that there is no serial device class as part of the USB ... it'll work with FreeBSD. ... Running Mac OS X Server is the ...
    (freebsd-hackers)
  • Re: Accept data from serial port into an input box?
    ... is equipped with a barcode scanner attached to it's serial port. ... when the user hits the enter key, the page will submit to the server ... if you can plug the serial device to an http bridge ("a serial ... server"), like the axis 2490, you can query the device ...
    (comp.lang.javascript)