[CentOS] OT: Hardware upgrade help

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Wednesday, August 24, 2011 3:04 AM +0100 Always Learning 
<centos at u61.u22.net> wrote:

> You need to do a little on-line reading about USB (the effective
> replacement for Centronics (parallel) ports and RS232/RS423 serial
> ports. Also about the PCI replacement called PCI-Express.

I see USB as being on par more with PCI-E than RS232/Centronics. It's a 
general external expansion bus, but lacks bus-mastering. Compare to 
Firewire, which adds bus-mastering. So for bus-level interfaces, use PCI-E 
inside the box, and USB or Firewire outside the box.

Ethernet and SATA interfaces then stack on top of PCI-E/USB/Firewire. (As 
does the older IDE now often referred to as PATA.)

The lspci and lsusb command line utilities can be used to view the topology 
of the buses. (Is there a Linux GUI tool similar to Windows Device Manager 
in view-by-connection mode to graphically show the topology? I've found 
that view a good way to get one's head around how this stuff goes together.)