Getting a FTDI USB-to-Serial converter to work on Ubuntu 9.10

nattster — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:57:32 +0000

I bought a USB-to-Serial converter from ETTeam.com and test it with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic kernel 2.6.31-18-generic.) I’ve found that it doesn’t show as /dev/ttyUSB0 as other generic USB-to-Serial converter do.

I’ve been googling for the solution for a while and found this bug report: ftdi serial driver broken in linux-image-2.6.31-14-generic (2.6.31-14.48)
It said that the fix is released with linux-kernel 2.6.32-13.18.

So I download a new 2.6.32 kernel package (.deb) from Ubuntu’s kernel-ppa. I installed these package with a command:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Now, I can load a ftdi_sio (FTDI Serial Input/Output) driver with a modprobe command. But it doesn’t recognize my device yet. I ran a lsusb command and found that my converter has a different Product ID. (It might be customized by ETTeam.com)

$ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 005: ID 0403:e2e6 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd

(0403 = vendor ID, e2e6 = product ID)

To get it work, I have to run the following command:

$ sudo modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x0403 product=0xe2e6

Then I replug the converter and it is shown as /dev/ttyUSB0 now!

nattster » usb

Getting a FTDI USB-to-Serial converter to work on Ubuntu 9.10