Hand scanners: recommendations?

[Syngin]

In today's installment of Syngin's quest to introduce 20 Linux systems on his company's shop floor, we find our hero in search of recommendations for suitable hand scanners that work well under Linux.

:D

Opinions anyone? ;)

[spowel4]

I just hooked in an old Symbol scanner and it worked as far as scanning in a barcode to gedit. It's a model L52106 and it uses a ps/2 keyboard wedge.

[bwkaz]

We have a bunch of Symbol LS2208 scanners at work, and I suspect they'd work just fine too. They have several modes of operation; by default they show up as an HID keyboard device, so the stuff you scan acts like input on a virtual keyboard.

But there's another mode, named "virtual COM port", that you can get the scanner into by scanning a special barcode. (You generate the barcode using some tool of Symbol's that I can't remember the name of at the moment.) In this mode, on Windows, you can install a special driver from windows update that makes the device show up as a COM port (it'd probably be ttyUSB* in Linux, if the driver existed), or you can forget the driver and open the "raw" device directly. Reads from the raw device return when something gets scanned, and I doubt that writes are supported.

I'm guessing the generic HID infrastructure in Linux would create a suitable /dev/hiddevX device file for the scanner when it's in this mode; reads from that device file would probably retrieve the same data.