I finally got around to hooking up my Ambient Email Notifier under Ubuntu. No idea why I waited so long, given it pretty much worked as soon as I plugged it in!
The Linux kernel has drivers for the CP2102 USB-to-RS232 chip built in, so as soon as it was plugged in it showed up as /dev/ttyUSB0.
The Python-Serial module is in the Ubuntu repositories, so after installing that, I just changed my checkinbox.py script to use /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of COM3 and added a cron job to check every 10 minutes.
How is this possible? I've got a Logitech iTouch wireless keyboard that's been working fine for years now and with Ubuntu 7.10 for 5 months, but after upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04, my keyboard batteries have gone flat 4 or 5 times now. One or more of the batteries seems to "short out" to 0.1v or even go -ve. I've tried 2 sets of NiMH batteries, one brand new and one that had been working fine for years. Could it be anything other than a coincidence?
Update: After about 2 weeks of the batteries dying every day or so, I've now been on the same charge for about 2 weeks now. So, I've no idea what update fixed it, but it's better now!
Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 has been fairly successful, but it took me a while to find out what had stopped my TV from working. Nothing seemed to be different, same xorg.conf file, no errors in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, "space" in the desktop for the TV, but the TV was black.
I finally found this nvnews forum post that gave the clue, and adding the following to the "Device" section in my xorg.conf file did the trick:
Option "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO" Option "TVStandard" "PAL-G"
