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Although a USB toy such as a polystyrene rocket launcher only includes a Windows CD, it works fine on Linux with a spot of reverse engineering. With libusb, this doesn’t even require compiling a device driver – Perl controls the device from userspace.
Trouble at the office? It doesn’t necessarily need to lead to a battle, such as in the video The Great Office War by toy manufacturer Hasbro. Even if you don’t have an attack plan, the USB-controlled Rocket Baby rocket launcher, by Chinese manufacturer Cheeky Dream, is a bargain at less than US$ 20. Not only did it cheer up my colleagues at work, it also gave me an opportunity to study the
Linux kernel’s fairly complex USB subsystem.
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Comments
How Do I Install This Special Barcode Reader?
Frank P Apr 21, 2009 6:31pm GMT
Great news about that. I would love to have all my computers running Linux, but one thing that is holding me back is a device that I have that earns my family a little money each month from shopping.Shopper's Hotline is a survey company that rewards families for using this scanning device to record purchases and transmits the information to the company.
The first one we had was a normal scanner hooked up to a normal phone line, but now we had to change to one that transmits over the internet using Windows.
I tried installing the program CD using WINE, program worked fine but it didn't pick up the USB scanner.
How Do I Install This Special Barcode Reader?