October – 2008 – metaruss

Archive for October, 2008

Keyspan USB to Serial Converter Driver

by Russ Knize on Oct.29, 2008, under Linux

Update 01/17/2012: Sorry for the broken links. I think I lost some .htaccess magic when moving around my site hosting. I’ve been using my Keyspan on my Debian box running the stock 2.6.32 kernel and have not had issues. That’s why this page is so stale…I forgot all about it.

This driver source code and firmware was taken directly from the kernel.org sources and packaged as a kernel module. It supports several of the Keyspan “USA” Series USB to Serial converters. This driver was removed from official Debian kernel sources due to its change in status as “non-free” per the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). This was the result of some unclear language in the license found in the firmware header files.

I had invested in several of these dongles due to their quality, performance, and good Linux support. Debian is the only distribution that is not happy with the licensing terms. Even Ubuntu (a Debian-derived distribution) has added this driver back to its kernels. I was a bit frustrated by this and have decided to package the driver for other Debian users.

Source Packages

The sources can currently be built for 2.6.18 and 2.6.26 kernels intended for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 “etch” and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “lenny”, respectively. Other kernels are likely supported as well, but will require Makefile and possibly source modifications due to internal API changes between kernel versions. You should be able to build the module by installing the keyspan-source package and then using module-assistant: “m-a prepare; m-a auto-install keyspan”.