29 Aug
2018
29 Aug
'18
1:03 p.m.
On 29 Aug 2018, at 03:06, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac
(the latter has mo serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an
equally-dodgy driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has infinite problems with these dongles. I have a
sacred old laptop running OpenBSD precisely to get serial consoles working as a) it has an
RS-232 port and b) the drivers are sane. I have a USB-serial dongle which on Mac, once the
driver is installed, creates a device called /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Serial-SiLo. Took me an
eternity to figure out it was that because the docs had nothing about which device file it
actually created and, well, considering it is a physical cable I had eliminated Bluetooth
to begin with… I confess to looking at the creation date on the device file and then
saying “naah, it cannot be… oh… it is…”
I do miss SunOS too - because of a single user with great powers we had to upgrade a
SparcStation 10 to Solaris back in 1994 and the performance took an instant nosedive. Not
to mention the hours spent getting tools to make it actually work (i.e. 99% of the GNU
project).
Arrigo