Connecting the rig to the computer

I decided to try out grig on my little ASUS EeePC 900 that I am using temporarily until I get another computer.  I have Slackware 14.1 installed.  It's actually very, very easy to do!  Read on for more.

This is Slackware-centric for the most part at first.  But the directions are generic enough to where you should be able to do this for nearly any modern Linux distro.

I have a USB-to-serial converter cable I bought off of eBay for a very good price.  This has the common Promise PL2303 chip in it.  I plugged it into the computer and then into the remote port on my 706.

I have sbopkg installed, so I pulled down both hamlib and grig from the SlackBuilds repo, building the packages and installing them as root.

Doing a quick search on Google, I found this website with easy directions on how to load the right driver into the kernel for the Promise chip.  Follow the directions and it should work nicely for you.

With my particular setup, I entered this at the command line to start grig:

$ grig -m 310 -r /dev/ttyUSB0

(Note: you will need to read up with grig's instructions to do this right.  I ran grig --list to find the model number for my radio.)

grig worked like a charm.  Unfortunately, there is very basic and limited support for my rig but at least I can type in frequencies instead of having to roll the dial around.

This was much easier than the last time I tried to do this in Windows 7 with dealing with different drivers and what-not.  I just thought I'd share this in case there's other's wanting to do the same thing.