Raspberry Pi usb redirect issue

Question

Okay I am going to try and be as discriptive as possible here to get this problem solved. I work at a company that makes BIG gear boxes and we have computers that run our Mills/Laths. These computers are currently FIT-PCs running XP. These computers are used to control the laths/mills via a usb to serial converter (PL2303_Prolific usb to serial converter). When it is plugged into an xp machine it is recognized as a com port. SO these machines are very old and are fail left and right, I intend to replace them with a raspberry pi running xfreerdp but I can't seem to get the usb serial device to be redirected to the virtual machine it is remoting into. Has anyone ran into this/know a fix for it? Please ask me questions if you are unsure of something because I am completely stuck here. TLDR Using raspberry pis as thin clients need to push a usb 2 serial cable through to the virtual xp machine

Answer 1

Unfortunately there are known issues with USB on Raspberry Pi. They're aware of the issue and working on it, but it is as of yet unresolved.

The USB Redux thread was created to capture the state of the work as well as the current list of work-arounds. The USB/serial converters are broken is a related thread.

There is hope, however. First, they are working actively to fix it, so I suspect it's just a matter of time. Second, there are a few things you can try.

• There's a config file in /boot/cmdline.txt where you can try adding a few entries. One that appears quite effective is dwc_otg.speed=1 and dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=1 (but they didn't help me). See this page for some examples.
• Update the kernel (search for rpi-update) to at least #348 (use uname -a to determine the kernel level)

Good luck.

Update (Mar 13 2013). There appears to be a fix for the majority of USB issues as of kernel #389. Use rpi-update to update.