USB In Linux

USB In Linux

Initially this page had some very dated info (from the days of Mandrake 7.0.) Things have improved vastly since then. While I've been a little slow to dig into USB, a new printer and my new laptop have forced me into the 21st century.

My laptop has very little in the way of useful ports. Luckily the USB support is great, so it hasn't been a big problem. So far I have connected the following USB devices:

Logitech wireless mouse

This just worked. I plugged it in and told XFree86 to look at /dev/input/mouse and I was off to the races. It's a very noce mouse, and the range is pretty good too. I'm probably going to lose it though, Sarah's expressed interest in it, and if Sarah ain't happy... ;)

Canon FBU630U

Out of those devices, all have worked perfectly except for the Canon scanner. There is presently no SANE back-end for it. Drivers would be more developed by now, but Canon won't even release specs, let alone support the device under Linux. Someone has gotten it to scan once, but the best way for met to get it working is to cheat and use VMWare 3.0. Usingi it and a Windows image you can simply plug the USB device in and it will install as expected. I've tried it, it works perfectly.

If this is option isn't available to you, I'd suggest getting a better scanner. The Epson Precision series are supposed to work great, as is the Visioneer 6100. This scanner was selling at Future Shop for $50CDN, but I couldn't find it in stock. Both the precision and Visioneer scanners are also USB.

The printers

The printers both work great using CUPS as the printer subsystem. The 5100a is an HPLJ4+ compatible printer. I've got the USB port plugged into my laptop and the parallel port plugged into Sarah's computer, both work fine. The Epson 880 does a wonderful job printing in colour with the gimpprint and CUPS drivers. Turboprint supposedly has even better drivers, but it's not Open and the default ones worked so well, I haven't bothered.

SMC EZ Connect USB Fast Ethernet Adaptor 2202USB

I recently purchased this handy little item used for $20. With kernel 2.4.18 is is supported using the "pegasus" module. To activate it after I plugged it in all I had to do was type "modprobe pegasus" and restart networking. I bought is for other PCs and to allow me to connect to other networks without messing up my settings on the built-in NIC. One word of caution: Being USB it is noticeably slower than using the Realtek 8139. I especially notice the speed when initially contacting new hosts. I'm not sure why it's so slow, but at least I don't have to use it as my primary NIC. I've read that it tops out at 3.3MBps sustained. This despite it being a 10/100 adaptor. USB just can't handle it. Oh well, it was certainly worth the $20.

Logitech QuickCam Express

I picked up an OEM version of this little webcam in Kingston for $32CDN. I'll admit it: I didn't really need it, but I _had_ to see what $30 got you in webcams. The answer: A camera worth no more than $30. It was a really silly purchase, the thing certainly isn't worth more than $30, but I don't feel ripped off, so I guess it's not all bad.

This was the first USB Linux-supported device that I had to download drivers for. It wasn't tough to install. This page gives very thorough instructions. The driver works with xawtv. The device is basically a camcorder, and Linux sees it as such. Xawtv is usually used for viewing TV from a tuner card, but it works very well as the webcam front-end. Just launch XawTV and the image from your webcam should pop right up. Right-click on it to view a list of options. One of the options is to save the image as a JPEG. I did this, the result (Cropped in The Gimp) is here:

QuickCam demo

As you can see, the quality isn't very good, but what do you expect for $30? While Xawtv isn't the most intuitive app for the webacam, it works very well and is a good, simple app for grabbing pics. I'm sure you can also use it to save MPEG movies, but I can't imagine that you'd get more than a few frames per second with the super-cheap QuickCam Express.