Tried the LDUSB path on my print server (a silent machine on the south
end of the house, which would serve as another data point.) It's an
Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) machine, running the stock 2.6.17 kernel... which
has a recently (early 2007) fixed bug in the driver:
ldusb 1-2:1.0: Read buffer overflow, 1937069164 bytes dropped
That's a good reason to update the machine, I suppose :-) but is a
(very minor) downside the the LDUSB path, in terms of just slapping
probes on random ambient machines without turning the whole thing into
an infrastructure modernization project. (Of course, Edgy doesn't
include python-pyusb either...)
This inspires me to check the chumby versions of things: turns out the production chumby ships with a 2.6.16 kernel (which is old enough that it doesn't have the LDUSB fixes) but it also turns out that
# CONFIG_USB_LD is not set
in linux-2.6.16/.config so that wouldn't work anyway. (On the
positive side, LDUSB won't be grabbing the device, so I won't have the
detachKernelDriver problem either...)
Footnotes: