[jason@sun ~]$: The Solaris junkie finds a home

I love my MacBook Pro.  It does everything I need so far with one exception: serial communication.

Some of the service engineers I know use the Keyspan adapter with their MBPs.  My local Best Buy doesn't carry this, and I didn't want to wait for shipping.  They do carry the Dynex adapter, though, which I purchased.

After a lot of poking around I found that I couldn't get the vendor drivers to cooperate.  Happily there's an open source driver that works great.  As it turns out, the Dynex adapter uses the PL2303 chip which seems to be somewhat popular.  The Sourceforge project can be found at http://osx-pl2303.sourceforge.net/.

Install the driver, then reboot.

To use the adapter you'll need something that can talk serial.  Mac OS X Leopard provides this functionality with the screen command.

To use your Dynex adapter with screen:

$ sudo su -
# screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0000101D 9600

The speed argument depends on what you're talking to.

You'll need the right cables, too.  Of course I didn't have them.  With a little effort, you can make serial cables, which I'll address in my next post.

I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts.  If I can do something without having to use my mouse or trackpad, I'm happy.

The Apple support pages have a pretty comprehensive list of default keyboard shortcuts.  You can find it at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343.

Also, my brother turned me onto auto-hiding the Dock.  This is great on a laptop where every pixel of real estate counts.  And if you're using Mac OS X Leopard, Spotlight is so effective that I typically use that to open an application -- or even just to change focus!  Just type ⌘-Space and type the first few characters of the app that you're looking for.  This doesn't work for Finder, but you can always get to it with ⌘-Tab.

I had to look all over to find the unicode for ⌘ -- it's ⌘ if anyone's interested.  As it turns out, Wikipedia has a whole article about the ⌘ key.