[OT] USB KVM switches

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Wed Feb 2 12:28:19 2005

It was thus said that the Great Tom Jennings once stated:
>
> I like USB. Of course I don't develop for it :-)

  I don't dislike USB, and the few USB devices I have (mostly digital
cameras) have just worked.

  Even under Linux.

  The first digital camera I had had a serial interface. Of course, the
camera side of the serial interface was non-standard, but since I had the
cable, that wasn't much of an issue. More of an issue was getting the stuff
*off* the camera. That ... wasn't so easy.

  In fact, for the first five or six years I had the camera, I *had* to use
Windows since the only drivers (or rather, program) available were for
Windows and the protocol wasn't published. Fortunately, someone somewhere
did reverse engineer the protocol and I was able to *finally* use the camera
under Linux.

  My two past digital cameras came with USB ports. Standard USB cable. The
cameras supported the standard USB storage device protocol, so it was a
simple matter of hoooking it up to my Linux system, issueing a "mount"
command and I can copy the pictures off the camera.

  Much much better than my first digital camera.

  In thinking about this, there are actually *two* issues. One is the
physical layer. Sure, serial is easy to wire up, even if one (or both) ends
terminate in an odd-ball connector (like my first digital camera, or the
Coco which uses a DIN-5 plug for serial, not a DB-25). The second is the
logical layer, or the actual data being sent across the line. My first
digital camera is a good example of this: so what that it's a serial port?
I *still* couldn't use it because the protocol was (for the most part)
undocumented.

  At least USB has a list of standardized protocols to use for various
devices.

  -spc (Then again, I'm more of a software guy ... )
Received on Wed Feb 02 2005 - 12:28:19 GMT