Mate of mine gave me one of the above mentioned PCI cards. This particular card provides 8 serial ports. It was quite easy to get the card working (no need to patch the kernel anyway). Here are the necessary steps:
- Download the ‘Linux Driver for ICOM Cards’ from http://support.advantech.com.tw/Support/DownloadSearchByProduct.aspx?keyword=PCI-1620A
- Run ‘tar xvzf ‘Adv950_Source_V3.30.gz’ (yes, it is a compressed tar file even if it doesn’t look like one)
- Then ‘cd adv950_source_v3.30/2.6/’ (for a 2.6.x kernel)
- ‘make’
- ‘sudo make install’
- And finally a ‘make test’ should result in the following:
/dev/ttyAP0 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP1 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP2 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP3 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP4 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP5 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP6 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP7 is RS232 - Now copy the kernel module into the right place ‘sudo cp adv950.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-28-generic/kernel/drivers/serial/’
- Run a ‘sudo depmod -a’
- Happy days!
Note: This is how it worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04.