I f you’re in the market for a new printer, you may want to consider one with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. While serial line interfaces were a great improvement over parallel interfaces, USB is even better. USB-connected printers are easy to configure and print faster (due both to faster communication with the host and more modern printer hardware).
I f you’re in the market for a new printer, you may want to consider one with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. While serial line interfaces were a great improvement over parallel interfaces, USB is even better. USB-connected printers are easy to configure and print faster (due both to faster communication with the host and more modern printer hardware).
Linux supports a very wide variety of USB devices. This month, we’ll delve into USB and see how easy it is to add USB peripherals to your Linux system.
All About USB
USB is a communication standard created in 1994 by a consortium of hardware and software vendors, including Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, and NEC. The companies’ goal was to devise a single standard bus capable of connecting a full range of peripheral devices to the computer. At the same time, they also wanted to overcome some of the problems and limitations of traditional serial and parallel connections. The companies achieved their goal: USB has almost completely obsoleted RS-232, ADB, PS/2, busmouse, serial, and parallel connections.
The USB bus can support many different kinds of peripheral devices: printers, modems, external hard disks, scanners, cameras and other multimedia devices, and so on. USB also provides an interface to the computer keyboard and mouse, and it’s also “plug-and-play”, meaning that (most) devices can be added and removed while the system is running.
The theoretical bandwidth of a USB bus is 12 Mbits/s; however, actual…
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