New userspace-only driver for cyberjack e-com (0x100)

I've just checked in a userspace-only version of the cyberjack e-com (0x100) driver. This means that we'll finally be able to work around the many broken old (drivers/usb/serial/cyberjack.c) cyberjack drivers that almost all the distributions ship. Apparently almost none of them seem to bother merging upstream fixes into their trees.

One minor problem though is that both cyberjacks need asynchronous delivery of interrupt URB's, a feature that is not available by libusb. The libausb wrapper library that I developed for this purpose is specific to Linux usbdevio, so the userspace driver won't be working on other libusb supported platforms such as *BSD :(

ctapi-CyberJack Version 2.0.8 has been released

I've made a new release of the ctapi-cyberjack driver for REINER-SCT. Until they put it up on their homepage, interested parties can always grab the latest source and rpms.

Make CyberJack drivers issue a key-press confirmation beep

This is a very useful feature, especially for blind people. Unfortunately there is no unique way of issuing some beep sound on Linux-based systems, so there needs to be some magic that determines whether running under X11 or not and call the appropriate code for beeping.

More work on the REINER SCT CyberJack drivers

I'm not sure if I did mention it on this blog, but I've been contracted by REINER SCT to work on a Linux driver for their CyberJack series of smart card readers for quite some time.

In the last days I've been spending quite an amount of time hunting down user-reported bugs in the driver, which is good. Sometimes it's really surprising to see in what kind of bugs stupid mistakes eventually result.

Also, I've now managed to make the driver work on x86_64, so it's working in little-endian 32 and 64bit, big endian 32bit. I have to test it on my UltraSPARC box to see whether 64bit big endian also works.