At some point in the past, Unix — the progenitor of Linux — treated virtually everything as a file, and all files were created more or less equal. Programs didn’t care if a file was local, on the ...

If you've been using computers for more than a couple of decades, you've probably used a serial port to attach peripherals like your mouse and modem. Until the USB standard rendered them obsolete in ...

With Linux and the serial port there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Linux has great support for serial hardware of all sorts and a host of tools for accessing the serial ...

In my last column [see LJ December 2002], we covered the serial layer in the 2.5 (hopefully soon to be 2.6) kernel tree. We mentioned in passing that a USB-to-serial driver layer in the kernel helps ...