Sharkport, USB Networking, or releasing USB devices

[drakonite]

I have a sharkport for my PS2. For those that dont' know what that is, it's a cable and software set that lets me connect my ps2 to my computer and copy game to/from my memory cards to my hard drive.

Unfortunatly the computer software is windows based.

I have a copy of vmware running windows so I can troubleshoot over the phone without restarting, and I was running the sharkport software under win2k in vmware successfully. But after upgrading my kernel I switched options a little bit and now the kernel has a driver that wants to claim the cable and vmware can't claim it.

This brings up lots of questions...

Wine can't run the software because it doens't emulate the drivers -- it needs kernel support. With a little research I found out the cable seems to just be a USB-to-USB networking cable. (Cypress EZ-Link to be exact) Has anyone had any luck making this work under wine using usb-to-usb support in the kernel? Or does anyone have any ideas to help me get it to work?

How do you go about telling linux to quit trying to control a device? I don't want to have to have a kernel that lacks the usb-to-usb support and have to restart just to use the sharkport so if I can't use wine I need to get linux to not claim it so vmware can.

...anyone know any good places to learn how to figure out the protocols used for hardware like this to write custom drivers?
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[drakonite]

Anybody with any ideas?
_________________
Shoot Pixels Not People

My GPG/PGP Public key