I've recently purchased a "USB wireless security lock" device. Its just a small key-chain device that you put in your key-chain and a USB stick (looks like a usb memory stick) that you connect to a free usb port.

The idea is that once you move away from the computer (2 meters), then the system automatically locks (either the screensaver comes up or a system-wide lock application is called). Once you come back to the computer and you are close enough, the system automaticaly unlocks it self.

So, does it work in Linux? no, ofcourse not. though i've nearly made it work, so here is what i've found out:


The device itself uses the core of a wireless mouse (?!), thus the device is detected as a mouse in linux. This ofcourse causes problems and interferes with your mouse pointer, so the first thing to do is modify the system to detect the device properly.

Now, based on this address (http://blogs.patchadvisor.com/bryan/...12/29/741.aspx) we can see that the device returns status information along with a unique id for each transmitter device.

I've managed to read the binary information from the device via a perl script found here: (http://misc.ernie.org/usblockd.html) though that still hasn't made it work as it should.

I'm still investigating how to properly use this device under Linux. Once i've got something new, i'll post it here. I would also appriciate any help from people who've seen such devices.

btw, the device is detected as:

kernel: input: USB HID v1.10 Joystick [Cypress Semi. Cypress Ultra Mouse] on usb-0000:00:10.1-2.3

i still haven't found out how to make linux detect is the way i want (as a simple USB device).

here is an update:

Because the device is detected as a USB mouse, sysfs/usbfs creates the /sys/bus/usb/... entries as if its a mouse. Then, hotplug and udev are executed which installs the /dev/input/mouse* and /dev/input/event* entries and registers the device as a mouse. As a result, the device affects the operation of the mouse (pointer jumps around).

The root of the problem is that the USB security lock device identifies itself as a mouse.

Does anyone know how to overide the usb identifiers that sysfs/usbfs detect?

Any help would be appriciated.

Thank you.

Good news, there are two people who have written some module or script for this device:

http://www.voyagerproject.org/

and

http://blog.pr00f.org/archives/2004/12/index.php

Well, the bad news is that both drivers don't work with kernel 2.6.10 or other relatively new kernel