How to get a Digi Edgeport/8 working with RHEL/CentOS 5

The issue: although Edgeport USB-serial devices have in-kernel support, the changes for the Edgeport/8 didn't make it into 2.6.18 .

Thanks to some great support from Digi and the driver author, I was able to get this working perfectly on CentOS 5.4, although this ought to work on any RHEL5 or CentOS5 version.

First, follow the procedure for installing the kernel source and setting up a non-root user build area.

Prepare for module build with this procedure

Download this patchfile , then change directory to BUILD/kernel-2.6.18/linux-2.6.18.i686/drivers/usb/serial/ and use the 'patch' program to update the driver source.

Change directory to BUILD/kernel-2.6.18/linux-2.6.18.i686 and do 'make M=drivers/usb/serial' . Copy the resulting io_ti.ko module to /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/

DON'T FORGET to run 'depmod -a' (like I did!), then reboot. You should see /dev/ttyUSB[0-7] created.

pyserial is handy for verifying the hardware is working correctly - I used the loopback test (test/test.py) from the source tarball.