IBM Multi-Port USB hub under OS/2

By Martin Iturbide

I personally had tested this USB hub, here are my comments.

What is the IBM USB Multi-port hub ?

This is a regular USB 5 port hub, but it have some additional ports.


 * 5 USB 1.1 Ports
 * 1 Parallel Printer Port
 * 1 Serial Port
 * 2 PS/2 Mouse and/or Keyboard Ports

What do you need ?


 * USB Basic Drivers for OS/2 (not necessary if you are using Convenience Pack)
 * USB Printer Driver
 * USB Serial Convertor Driver

I been testing this device and the USB hub functionality works without problems with tested with the latest USB Basic Device Driver version (2.11).

The two PS/2 ports also work without any problems. I had tested a mouse and a keyboard there. On this hub I had connected three USB mice, a USB Keyboard and one PS/2 mouse at the same time, and everything was working fine under my OS/2 Warp 4 Convenience Pack (MCP).

The parallel port also works using the USB Printer Drivers. When I plugged the USB Hub with the printer (before installing the USB Printer drivers) it shows a new icon on the printers.”USB_Parallel_IBM_USB_Parallel_Converter_1”. Just make a right click on it an check that you have the corrected driver for the printer.



The only thing that seems not to work fine is the serial port. However, recently IBM has released the Serial Convertor Device Driver and offers official support for the serial port functionality of this device.

On windows there is an special driver that will assign (in my case) COM3 to the Hub’s, it seems OS/2 requires a driver for it.



Possible the reason why the parallel port doesn’t work under OS/2 is because the “USB Printer Driver” put a new port for the printers instead of redirect the LPT2 port. And the same thing for the Serial port, there is not any kind of driver for OS/2 for USB to Serial converter.

If anyone got more information about this hub, or make the parallel and serial port to work, please contact us!