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 ...

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 ...

In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic analyzer. Today, you can get cheap logic ...