usb serial cable support

Hi all,
My Knoppix HD installation has been up and running fine for about 18 months and is very stable and supports all my hardware- in short, I'm very pleased with it. My main use of the system is for java development.

I've hit a problem though in that I need to connect a serial device via a usb serial cable, which is not properly supported. If you plug the cable in and do a lsusb, the device is recognised and you get the vendor/product code 4348:5523 (nothing else). I've tried forcing the usbserial driver to use this device by modprobe, and it sort of works at the wrong baud rate (device is stuck at 57600- I want be able to set it to 9600!).

Much research shows that a better driver for this device is ch341, which is present in much newer linux kernels e.g. 2.6.27 but not in mine (2.6.19) so the dilemma I have is:

Do I:
1. upgrade the kernel and risk- well, what are the risks?? I don't want to break my system...
2. Compile the driver from ch341.c (I have this file; I can see from the code that it supports my cable) I should say I've sort of played with this but gcc produces lots of errors relating to missing include files. I'm not sure where to get these from, despite much reading up.
3. At a push, I suppose I'd have to buy a new cable but I'd like to get my head around compiling drivers.

Any suggestions are most welcome!

Best regards,
Alan

Maybe that wasn't too good an idea...

Attempting to compile it resulted in hundreds of errors- I worked through all those errors relating to missing include files for 2.6.19 kernel that were not supplied in my distro (I got them from kernel.org), but there is still literally hundreds- it starts with many relating to BITS_PER_LONG that I'll never be able to fathom.

Anybody actually successfully compiled this for Knoppix 5.1.1?

I might park this for now and look into the ch341 patch for the usbserial driver that I've found ...

Clutching at straws though!

Alan

The patch I'm on about is here:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.usb.devel/57633

Can anyone explain to me please how to apply this patch?