Have USB to serial adapter, how to verify it's working?

murphaph

Hi all,
Ubuntu 10.04

currently trying to establish a serial port connection (under PHP using this, but that's not important right now).

I have no real serial port on this laptop so bought one of those €3 USB to serial adapters off amazon to see would it work.

When I plug the thing in and do a dmesg I see:
pl2303 coverter detected
pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0

Is that all I need to see to be sure that Linux now sees this thing as a serial port or are there more tests I can run from the command line to verify? I would really like to verify that the port works at this stage rather than bang my head against a PHP wall when it could be an OS/hardware thing!

I intend to build a serial port device (not yet built!) but don't actually have an old modem etc. around to try to communicate with. Anybody know any way to test the port with nothing connected to it (I could attach an led for example and blink it, if I knew how to do that from the Linux command line)

Any thoughts? Anybody else using these cheap and dirty adapters? Do they actually work? lol.

murphaph

nevermind...permissions issue. PHP script now happily accessing the serial port from remote computer. Next part....