Hi all, I’ve recently switched over to Linux Mint from Windows 10 and I’m having trouble installing a CH340 driver from Sparkfun. I’ve managed to unzip the contents and have it in this location: /home/user/Downloads/CH341SER_LINUX. I’ve tried running the files using the ./ command for both the ch34x.c and Makefile but ran into a bash issue which I’m stuck trying to figure out. Could someone please tell me how to make it work? I’ve already looked up a couple of different videos on Youtube but they kind of skip the explanation of how to install this driver on Linux in favor of Windows and MacOS.
Please see the attached image for the response I get in the terminal.
UPDATE: It turns out I had a bad micro USB cable. Most of the ones I was using to connect to an ESP32 board were charge only. Mint apparently had the driver for this all along. Thanks for the help everyone.
Why are you trying to install a driver for a CH340? The driver is already built into the kernel. Just plug it in and it will work.
This.
However sometimes the user can’t access the device. Depending on your system, I recommend adding your user to the dialout/serial group.
I.e. quick online search
Like nearly all drivers lol
Drivers I needed to pay special attention to:
- NVidia (we all know the official stance on that topic)
- e1000e needs patching because my Laptops NIC somehow reports the wrong NVM checksum
- Some obscure chinese “USB to DVI-D” adapter
- The fingerprint sensor in my Laptop, as it’s still experimental
Whoa, you got the fingerprint sensor working? What laptop brand is it, and what distro are you using?
It’s a Dell Latitude 5420, with a Broadcom Corp. 58200. Per https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Dell#Latitude, the 5420 is supported with libfprint-2-tod1-broadcom. And of course, I use Arch btw.
Please dont follow windows workflows.
If you run a random script with or without sudo, you can easily get malware or break your system.
A .c file is also not ran, it is a C source file and needs to be compiled
i.e. you are doing something completely wrong and followed some strange advice.
Instead,
- Try if the USB cable is the only issue
- Drivers are in the kernel, so you cannot just install them
- Ask Linux Mint people how to do this, or Ubuntu or Debian people (the distros are related)
The driver should already be installed but there seems to be an issue with brltty registering the corresponding USB ID when they shouldn’t. You can probably fix it by following this guide: https://koen.vervloesem.eu/blog/how-to-stop-brltty-from-claiming-your-usb-uart-interface-on-linux/ (or this one: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/670637)
Edit: Perhaps this has since been fixed in Mint 21 / Ubuntu 22.04.
Some time ago I wasted about 2 hours of time because of that damn brltty, wondering why the tf the arduino was not being detected until I followed dmesg. I was very upset at the time when I found out what brltty was. Like I get some people need that but if the user did not connect a braille display during install then the daemon should never be enabled or just uninstalls during os installation.
*.c files are C source files, you can’t run these directly. Run the makefile with sudo make or sudo make install (assuming you have make installed) to build (or build and install) the driver.
edit: Oops didn’t read far enough into your post, you’ve already tried make. What error does it give you?
I get this as a result:
user@user-System-Product-Name:~/Downloads/CH341SER_LINUX$ sudo make Makefile
make: Nothing to be done for ‘Makefile’.
I did what abominable_panda suggested and it returned a “wait_queue_t” and a couple of pointer type errors. I’m not sure if that’s something that could be fixed with installing something else, but I’m not at all familiar with troubleshooting on this OS yet. The troubleshooting part you mentioned is if it successfully installed but there are issues. It doesn’t quite explain the initial installation part.
As for cmnybo’s question, I’m trying to program a ESP32 module with the Arduino IDE. I’ve tried just plugging it in and hoping the driver would already be installed but lsusb doesn’t show it on the results.
If it’s not showing up in lsusb and there is no activity in syslog when connecting or disconnecting it, then the problem is not a driver. It’s likely a bad cable or you got a dead module.
