www.herd-of-neurons.com

I need a serial port for my laptop. Being really cheap I grabbed the cheapest one I could find off of EBay. The only problem was that the device isn't known to Gutsy.
jardine@mywhim:~$ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:c404 Logitech, Inc. TrackMan Wheel
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 4348:5523
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

This quickly turned into it's own little lesson on getting things to work:

• How do you build a custom kernel for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon?

First you need the right software installed. So, as root:
sudo apt-get install linux-kernel-devel fakeroot build-essential

Next you need to get the source. I needed a driver which is in Andrew Mortons patch. That let me to getting a bleeding edge kernel + mm patch.

1. apt-get install git-core
2. git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-gutsy.git ubuntu-gutsy

That mean that I had to find and add a module to Gutsy. No problem, a quick check on Google for 4348:5523 turned up a driver in the mm tree. This was pretty easy to grab:

• Look on kernel.org for the latest pre-patch kernel tree
• Grab the latest release candidate patches
• Grab the Andrew Morton patches