Plugable Now Shipping to 27 Countries in Europe
Posted on 25. Sep, 2011 by Bernie Thompson in News
In partnership with Amazon’s expanding European coverage, we’re happy to announce that several of our products are now available for order in the UK and 26 other countries in Europe, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden.
Simply order any of our offered Plugable products on Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon will dispatch the product from their UK warehouse to your destination quickly, and with perks like FREE Super Saver Delivery on eligible items.
We’re really excited about this, as it allows a much wider audience access to great products like our USB graphics adapters for adding up to 6 monitors to a system, our USB gigabit ethernet adapters for upgrading wifi or 10/100 only laptops and tablets, and more.
Amazon.co.uk product sales, documentation, and support are English language only, and our ability to ship replacement units outside the UK is limited. See our EU FAQ for all the details.
And if we’re still not serving you — you’re outside the US, UK, and EU — please let us know what you’d like to see next. We’re constantly looking to expand our options.
Until then, please check out our Plugable products on Amazon.co.uk and the full line at Amazon.com.
Thanks for going out of your way for us!
Howto: Installing ASIX’s USB Gigabit Ethernet Driver on Mac OS X Lion 10.7
Posted on 27. Jul, 2011 by Bernie Thompson in USB2-E1000
If you plug one of our Plugable USB2-E1000 USB 2.0 to Gigabit Ethernet Adapters or others based on the ASIX 88178 chipset into an Mac Lion system, Apple will match it with the Apple Gigabit Ethernet driver that’s included in Lion.
Unfortunately, Apple limits compatibility to Apple brand adapters (even though they use the same ASIX chipset). And it fails on non-Apple adapters in a confusing way: it will show as “Connected” in the Network control panel, but connections out won’t work — you’ll notice it has a self-assigned IP address (169.*), no router, and no DNS server. It looks something like this:
Fortunately, ASIX has an updated driver which works on Lion (and older versions). Note that if you had done this before upgrading to Lion, your old driver may be 32-bit. Lion moves all systems to a 64-bit kernel, so in the case of a Lion upgrade, you may have to uninstall the old driver (uninstaller included in the driver package), and follow the steps below to get ASIX’s latest driver.
Download the Plugable USB2-E1000 (ASIX 88178 chipset) driver.
If you’re downlading with Safari, look for the Download folder the Lion has in your Dock by default. Click on that to bring up recent downloads, which looks like this:
Open that folder, then click on the “.dmg” to open the ASIX driver installer disk image.
The image then shows up on the left side of the window, below your other drives, called “DISK IMAGE”. Click on this to open the image, then click on the installer (the icon with the package opening).
You’re finally out of Lion’s folders and into the installer proper.
The ASIX 88178 driver isn’t big (254K)
You will be prompted to let the driver install.
A reboot is required for the newly installed driver to be active.
After the reboot, if you open the Network control panel, you should now see “Connected”, but now also with a properly assigned IP address, DNS, etc.
If that’s not the case (or something goes awry later), it’s common on Mac OS X to need a fresh interface for the adapter, which you can create via the network control panel (this creates a new, clean configuration for an adapter). See the ASIX Mac installation guide for details.
And once you have that automatically assigned IP address, you should be done – open Safari and enjoy!
And if you have a Plugable adapter and have any problems at all, we’re here to help. Visit support.plugable.com or email support@plugable.com anytime. Thanks!
Where to Buy
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Plugable USB 2.0 to 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN Network Adapter (ASIX AX88178 Chipset) | Product Details | $26.95 | ![]() |
Installing a USB Serial Adapter on Mac OS X
Posted on 12. Jul, 2011 by Bernie Thompson in Tips
The easiest way to go about installing our Plugable USB to Serial adapter is by starting with the device.
- If you want to verify that the adapter and the driver were installed properly click here
Connect the device to the Mac. Once connected click on the Apple icon and on ‘About This Mac’

Click on ‘More Info…’

Click on ‘USB’ on the left and on the ‘USB-Serial Controller D’
If all is well you should be seeing something like this:

Time to get the driver! Fire up Safari and browse to http://plugable.com/drivers/prolific/ and scroll down to Mac.
Click on the ‘PL2303 MacOSX10.6 dmg v.1.4.0.zip’, the Safari Downloads window should come up:

Double click on the md_PL23-3_MacOSX10

Now double click on the PL2303_1.4.0.dmg to mount the image

Now double click on the PL2303_1.4.0 to start the installation

Once the installer comes up click ‘Continue’ to proceed.

Then ‘Select a Destination’ click on your desired drive and click ‘Continue’ to move forward

Now just click ‘Install’ to continue.

You may be asked of your username and password – enter them and click ‘OK’

You’ll get a warning about restarting the computer after the installation is complete. This is normal, click ‘Continue Installation‘.

Installing should start (takes a couple of minutes to complete)

When it’s done you should see this:

Click on ‘Restart’ to reboot the Mac.
After you restart, check that everything has installed OK.
On the Mac there are two methods to determine this:
Method 1:
Click on ‘Applications’

Click on ‘Utilities’

Click on ‘Terminal’

Type:
kextstat | grep prolific
and:
ioreg -c IOSerialBSDClient | grep usb
Your results should be very close to this:

Method 2:
Click on ‘System Preferences’

Click on ‘Network’

Now click on the ‘+’ sign on the bottom left, and then on the ‘Select the interface and enter a name for the new Service’ click on ‘Interface’ – you should be seeing the ‘USB-Serial Controller D’ there.

This will create a “Network” interface for a modem or serial port. Because it’s a serial port, it’ll say “Not Configured” and that’s normal:
From the “Advanced” button you can change default settings (usually not needed). And this won’t change the “Not Configured” message – that’s still ok.
Now finally, you need an application which will talk to the serial port. On Mac, the file which maps to the port is /dev/cu.usbserial. If you have a null modem cable and a terminal program on the other side, the Mac actually has a built-in terminal program called “screen” that you can use to test the connection.
Once that is up and connected (and if the serial ports are set to the same baud rate and paramters), you can type on either side and see the characters come across.
Support
USB Serial on the Mac is a real melding of the very new and very old. If you have any trouble, just visit plugable.com/products/pl2303-db9/support/ to see existing FAQs for Plugable’s USB Serial adapter.
Where to Buy
| Plugable USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter (Prolific PL2303HX Chipset) | Product Details | $11.95 | ![]() |















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