I installed two of these in an old machine running Ubuntu. They were immediately recognized on boot-up. I have serial devices connected to all four ports simultaneously, and am not experiencing any issues. Certainly worth the money spent.
I need at least 3 serial ports for my needs. My MB has one, this card fits the bill for the rest. For the price it is a steal. The instructions are somewhat vague and it helps to be a little computer savvy.
PROS: Great price, 2 COM ports. Nice solid build quality.
CONS: A bit difficult to find the right drivers on the CD, but they are there. I had to stumble around the disk to find what works for Windows 7 64.
There are few of us who still need RS-232, but for those that do, this is a good choice. Hardware chipset means no connectivity or voltage issues (as with some USB adapters).
Like all of Monoprice's stuff, inexpensive and of good quality. I've had zero issues with this item or any of the other things I have ordered through them over time. Also can't beat the overnight shipping service - fast and cheap.
The cd has an out of date driver for linux. I could not figure out how to get it working with just setserial command. I was, however, able to get it working with this patch: http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/65010/
lspci -v shows:
05:04.0 Serial controller: NetMos Technology PCI 9865 Multi-I/O Controller (prog-if 02 [16550]) Subsystem: Device a000:1000 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 16 I/O ports at 1000 [size=8] Memory at f0500000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Memory at f0501000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2 Kernel driver in use: serial
05:04.1 Serial controller: NetMos Technology PCI 9865 Multi-I/O Controller (prog-if 02 [16550]) Subsystem: Device a000:1000 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18 I/O ports at 1008 [size=8] Memory at f0502000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Memory at f0503000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2 Kernel driver in use: serial
05:04.2 Parallel controller: Illegal Vendor ID Device 9865 (prog-if 03 [IEEE1284]) Subsystem: Device a000:2000 Flags: medium devsel I/O ports at 1010 [disabled] [size=8] I/O ports at 1018 [disabled] [size=8] Memory at f0504000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=4K] Memory at f0505000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=4K] Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2