I have a USB-to-serial adapter on one of the USB ports connected to a serial port Wacom tablet. The Wacom is controlled via TabletMagic (opensource project) preference pane. The pane initiates a daemon when required (the user can enable & disable the daemon from within the pane). All was well until I tried installing a Wacom driver (there are no modern drivers for serial port tablets, but where's the fun in not experimenting?). Once I determined that the Wacom s/w didn't work I uninstalled everything I could find (a few files in Extensions and Application Support folders) that had names related to Wacom or Tablet. (There is nothing other than the pref pane associated with TabletMagic so there is no danger of getting too delete-happy...) The tablet now doesn't work as it used to -- sometimes it is not recognized by the pref pane, sometimes it is but no data transfer takes place. I plugged a loop-back adapter to the USB-serial adapter and launched QuickTerm. (QT settings: 9600, 8/1/none & no handshaking.) The resulting text on the screen is good from between 160-250 characters. Then lock-up. Or outright crash. Any suggestion as to my next step would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Dave Mac Intel Mini 1.83 GHz / 2 GB / 230 GB OS X 10.5.8 TabletMagic 2.0b17d2 Prolific-based PL2303 USB-serial adapter Source Forge PL2303 drivers 0.3.1
Try another USB port? Spit on the connectors? Complete backup restore? Maybe not worth it...... Anything serial port is ancient, and Wacoms aren't that expensive unless you're into the commercial sized ones.
I have a USB-to-serial adapter Problem solved. The solution proved to be much simpler than I thought: the Wacom (or the USB-serial adapter) doesn't like being plugged into a USB hub. Once plugged into one of the Mac Mini's ports, all is good. You might drag out that adapter from the closet. The drivers from Source Forge really are light years better than the ones by the chip manufacturer: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/> Thanks to all, Dave
If I ever find the time, there is actually one case where I'd like to The Keyspan has it's own drivers that -- according to Google ;-) -- seem to do just fine. Re. a comm utility, I found that CoolTerm does the best of the ones I've tried. Available at all the usual places. Dave