[rescue] Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 09:49:56AM -0400, John Floren wrote:

> I think I could probably deal with losing the parallel port (Goodbye,
> dot-matrix printer) but the worst thing is the way it's getting harder
> to get real serial ports. As with these parallel ports, the serial
> hardware is on the motherboard, there's just nowhere to connect a
> cable. They tell us to use USB to serial converters, but I do a lot of
> debugging with serial consoles on Plan 9, and USB-serial doesn't work
> so well there :(

It seems to me that there have to be some good USB serial dongles
somewhere, and that someone should know what they are.  

Lots of people claim that keyspan is the best, and it appears they don't
use the same chips as everyone else.  Can anyone verify what is better? 

Also, what about the FTDI chips?

Finally, how can people be certain they aren't just driver issues?  I
use a lot of prolific USB dongles, and as far as I can tell, the only
short coming I've found has been a driver issue.

I would rather push for USB devices to be fixed, or for specialty
devices to be made than to pine for the legacy serial ports, since the
legacy ports are often not enough anyway.