| gabriel rosenkoetter on Sat, 5 Oct 2002 15:37:16 -0400 |
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On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 01:32:15PM -0400, Paul wrote: > I advised a guy that, depending on the internals of the mouse, a ps/2 > mouse might not work with a serial port adapter. Is that generally true? To the best of my knowledge, that's not true. The software's looking for a certain set of signals, those signals are conveyed in one way on a PS/2 cable, in another on a serial cable, but they're *there* in both, so a convertor should just work. > The guy bought a USB mouse which came with a ps/2 adapter. Then, he > wanted to buy a ps/2 to serial port adapter, which I thought was...not > what I would do. USB --> ps/2 --> serial I told him he would be better > off buying a USB card which would enable the mouse to work and give him > the option of adding other USB devices in the future. (I know buying an > actual serial port mouse would be the simplest solution.) That's a pretty ridiculous series of adaptors, though. Forget translation problems, what about signal loss? And, actually, you may end up with trouble getting power out to the mouse if it needs a lot of juice (like, say, those fancy optical mice). > I also advised (sorry for this) that if he is running Win98 that using > USB wouldn't be a problem. Under what circumstances *would* using USB be a problem? The current version of every major operating system I can think of except for Irix supports it. (And I'm excepting Irix because I don't know, not because it doesn't.) USB is an open standard. It's a very clear standard. It's really easy to support. It's a *good* thing. (Now, the fact that only new keyboards support it and all new keyboards have mushy, bad-feedback keys... and that you can't find a 3-button USB mouse unless you buy it from Sun... THOSE are problems. But not immediately relevant here, I don't think.) > Did I offer sound advice or am I getting rusty? Well, if your advice was "you're being silly, why go through all those convertors when you could probably get a PCI USB card for the same price", then you came to the right conclusion even if some of your support was a bit off. :^> > Has anyone had a problem using USB cards either under Linux or Windows? Nope, but I've never owned a computer running either, so... (I've also never had problems with USB on any of NetBSD, Solaris, Mac OS, or Mac OS X, all of which I have actually used. ;^>) -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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