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Shagbag

Member

Registered: 2006-10-25

Posts: 259

USB to (DB9) Serial Adapter and Minicom - help needed

I'm having problems with my Netgear DM111P ethernet modem.
I bought it off ebay and it was 'bricked' on arrival .
All of the LEDs are flashing okay except for a solid red one which should be solid green.
I would like to reflash the firmware.  However, I've never done this before and I'm learning as I go.
I've only just started the process and so far it hasn't been that successful.
Basically, I don't know what to do.
Since my IBM Thinkpad T40 doesn't have a serial port, I bought a USB to Serial adapter.
When I plug it into a spare USB port, dmesg reports:

:
:
usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for pl2303
pl2303 2-2:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
usb 2-2: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver

and lsmod shows the pl2303 kernel module has loaded:

n00b ~  $  lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
pl2303                 19076  0 
usbserial              30696  1 pl2303

So, if I understand things correctly, the USB to Serial adapter has been recognised by the kernel and the driver loaded.  dmesg also reports:

n00b ~  $  dmesg | grep tty
console [tty0] enabled
00:0a: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a NS16550A
usb 2-2: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0

which suggests I should configure minicom (# minicom -s) with /dev/ttyUSB0 rather than /dev/ttyS0.  However - and this is where I'm out of my depth with minicom - when I invoke minicom it comes up with a dialog saying "Initializing Modem".  I don't want to use a modem.  I want to see what the CFE bootloader of my DM111P is outputing so that I can see what's wrong with it.

Can anyone help me out with this please?  I've never done any serial port work before.